Yesterday, this topic was discussed in -project meeting. http://community.opensuse.org/meetings/opensuse-project/2011/opensuse-projec... 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. ;-) Best, -- _/_/ Satoru Matsumoto - openSUSE Member - Japan _/_/ _/_/ Marketing/Weekly News/openFATE Screening Team _/_/ _/_/ mail: helios_reds_at_gmx.net / irc: HeliosReds _/_/ _/_/ http://blog.zaq.ne.jp/opensuse/ _/_/ -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-project+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse-project+help@opensuse.org