Mailinglist Archive: opensuse-project (280 mails)

2011/2/10 Satoru Matsumoto <helios_reds@xxxxxxx>:

Yesterday, this topic was discussed in -project meeting.
http://community.opensuse.org/meetings/opensuse-project/2011/opensuse-project.2011-02-09-16.06.log.html

I appreciate you, meeting participant, discussing this topic and I'm
sorry I couldn't join the meeting.

Satoru Matsumoto wrote:

Satoru Matsumoto wrote:

* Which country's copyright law and guidelines should we refer to?

I think this is the most important question here and should be clarified
first. Without clarifying this, further discussions would be invalid.

Sorry if I have confused you. The 2 major issues which I want to clarify
in this thread are:

1. License of the contents on *.opensuse.org sites
2. Which country's copyright law and guidelines should we refer to,
when we want to draw contents from external sites for OWN?

===================================================================

1. License of the contents on *.opensuse.org sites

ATM, the contents on Wiki (en.o.o and other $LANG.o.o) are published
under GFDL 1.2 'unless expressly indicated otherwise'. However, the
license for contents on other *.opensuse.org isn't defined (we can only
see the description '© 2010 Novell, Inc. All rights reserved.' in footer
area on most of the *.opensuse.org sites).

If I understand correctly, when someone wants to *re-use* the contents
on those sites, she has to ask permission from Novell. And only the
copyright owner (in this case, Novell) can decide which license to be
applied.

This situation makes things complex.

We can re-use and modify contents on en.o.o according to the GFDL
license. That's why we can translate the contents on en.o.o and put the
translations on $LANG.o.o. The original articles on en.o.o are published
under GFDL and the translations of those articles will be also published
on $LANG.o.o under GFDL license - there's no problem at all.

But how about articles from news.o.o, lizards.o.o and lists.o.o? Can we
re-use and translate them without permission of Novell? In addition,
when we translate them for OWN Japanese edition and put them on ja.o.o
(just for example ;-) ), do we need to 'expressly indicate the license
for them otherwise'? (If we don't do so, all the contents on ja.o.o
will be automatically considered to be published under GFDL license.)

I believe all the announcements from our project should be reached to as
many people as possible regardless of whether the readers are good at
reading English or not. And most of the authors of lizards.o.o also
might hope their blog posts will be read by as many readers as possible.
That's one of the biggest reasons why I translate OWN every week. The
current situation - license of the contents on *.opensuse.org aren't
defined - isn't good for me (and for those who want to translate OWN),
at least.

2. Which country's copyright law and guidelines should we refer to,
when we want to draw contents from external sites for OWN?

If the license issue above will be clarified, the situation will be
better than now. But still, there are other problems.

ATM, we are introducing articles from external sites (personal blogs and
sites by organizations) in OWN.

I know, basically we need to ask permissions from copyright owners of
those articles each time we want to draw them for OWN, unless they are
published under the licenses such as GFDL or CC BY-SA. But that will
become strained for us OWN team.

However, most of the copyright laws contain exemptions, which allow us
to draw (quote) others works legitimately under certain conditions. What
are considered to 'legitimate citations' depends on each law and guideline.

So the question here is: which country's copyright law and guidelines
should we refer to, when we want to draw contents from external sites
for OWN?

* The authors of original articles live in various countries.
* The external sites are hosted in various countries.
* (ATM,)we are using berlios.de for editing OWN.
* OWN is published primarily on news.o.o.
* PDF and Wiki versions of OWN are put on en.o.o.
* Translated OWN are published on $LANG.o.o.
* Greek editions are also published on http://own.opensuse.gr/ , which
is run by Greek community (?) [1].
* Infrastructures for openSUSE project are owned and run by Novell,
which exists in USA.
* Editors of OWN live in various countries.
* The current editor in chief (Sascha) lives in Germany.
* Translators of OWN live in various countries (ATM, only ja and gr are
active so that most of them live in Japan or Greece).

Now you might understand why this issue is so complex.

Which country's copyright law and guidelines should we refer to, when we
want to draw contents from external sites for OWN, in case ...:

a. we publish English version of OWN on news.o.o ?

A. we should refer to the law and guideline of each original author or
copyright owner.
B. we should refer to the law and guideline of USA, because
infrastructure of news.o.o is owned by Novell.
C. we should refer to the law and guideline of Germany, because editor
in chief lives in Germany.

b. we publish $LANG version of OWN on $LANG.o.o ? (to make things
simple, let's imagine ja here)

A. we should refer to the law and guideline of each original author or
copyright owner.
B. we should refer to the law and guideline of USA, because
infrastructure of $LANG.o.o is owned by Novell.
C. we should refer to the law and guideline of Japan, because all the
translators and most of the readers live in Japan.

c. we publish Greek version of OWN on own.opensuse.gr ?

A. we should refer to the law and guideline of each original author or
copyright owner.
B. we should refer to the law and guideline of USA, because the
original OWN which are the base of Greek translations are on
news.o.o.
C. we should refer to the law and guideline of Greece, because the
site for publishing Greek version is run by Greek organization and
all the translators and most of the readers live in Greece.

If the answer for every situation would be A, we have to give up drawing
contents from external sites because it is almost impossible to refer to
laws and guidelines of all over the world or ask permissions from
copyright owners each time. :-(

But if the answers would be B or C, we just need to refer to the
corresponding laws and guidelines. That will make our work much more
compliant.

[1]
This is yet another topic, though. When I search the registrar of
opensuse.gr at https://grweb.ics.forth.gr/Whois?lang=en , I could see
'Registrar Referral URL:http://www.papaki.gr'. So, the domain
opensuse.gr doesn't seem to be owned by Novell. But according to our
trademark guidelines:
'If you want to include all or part of an openSUSE Mark in a domain
name, you should seek our permission (see "Contact Information" below to
request permission). (...) By "domain name" we mean to refer to toplevel
domains and second-level domains, but not sub-domains.'
http://en.opensuse.org/OpenSUSE_Trademark_Guidelines#Domain_Names

I have a little concern, whether Greek community is permitted to use
this domain name by Novell or not. If not yet, I recommend you to ask
permission from Novell. ;-)

About that, I will tell you the story and anyone who knows should tell
us (the Greek Community) about it and if we need to ask permission
from Novell. Let me say at that point that we don't have a reason not
to ask permission from Novell if needed, the reason we did not so far
is because we believe we didn't have to.
When we started the Greek community a few months ago a friend of the
community told us he owned the opensuse.gr domain name and he told us
that he can redirect it wherever we wanted.
The opensuse.gr was for sale when this person bought it legal(under
Greek laws). Now we use that at the moment as re-directions to:
- http://opensuse.gr redirects to http://el.opensuse.org/Main_Page
- http://amb.opensuse.gr redirects to http://opensuseambassadors.blogspot.com/
- http://own.opensuse.gr redirects to http://el.opensuse.org/Weekly_news
and we are planning to do also something else those days that we might
use another redirection,but it is mainly planning for now...
Bottom line if in my country I can legally buy a domain name that it
is related to a company which laws are stronger?
We are using this domain name for community causes ONLY anyway so
asking permission and finally getting it we don't think is a problem,
please only those who really know that answer me on that so that I
won't be confused( I get that easily in legal matters). After that if
I have to ask permission from Novell I will inform the rest of the
community about it so that we make the right actions so that all will
be perfectly legal.
BTW can anyone give me an example of a toplevel domain a second-level
domain and a sub-domain?
Thanks in advance
Kostas

Best,

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_/_/ Satoru Matsumoto - openSUSE Member - Japan _/_/
_/_/ Marketing/Weekly News/openFATE Screening Team _/_/
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_/_/ http://blog.zaq.ne.jp/opensuse/ _/_/
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