So... Am I the only confused with all that legal stuff? ;-) Bottom line,I don't have a problem publishing my articles at OWN, so can anyone write a what-to-do so that our articles at our blogs or anything else we have will have the proper copyright and the proper licenses for that? Thanks in advance I'm not an Expert too ;-)
But if i understand this right, then if you create a new Document on your Page, you are the Copyright Holder. And you can set (c) 2011 by XXX. With setting CC or any other to your Page you give others a permission to use your Work.
A small HowTo for Wordpress and Blogger is given there as Example: http://wiki.creativecommons.org/Publish/Text#Blog
I believe (I'm not an IP lawyer, but I've worked with IP for some year) that the copyright vests in the author and is there from the time the work is created, not just from publication. So if you write your blog in a open office and copy it into the blog page, the first step creates the copyright and the second step (publication) is just that, publication. When you publish something you are not giving free licence to people to copy your work, you have just given people permission (a licence) to read it. If you want to permit people to do more, you should add a licence statement. As most bloggers want other people to redistribute their work, one of the CC licences which permits this is a good idea. It also means that OWN can't use material from any sites (? pages) which don't have a licence statement. I believe also (but I'd take legal advice in this circumstance) that the country where the author is ordinarily resident is the country whose copyright law applies. If this is true, then the openSUSE sites have material with copyright created under many countries' laws. I believe also (with the same rider) that the publication is a simpler matter as the publisher can state in the licence what legal framework applies. The tricky bits here are the people who put up their material with no licence statement (= no permission to copy and reuse) and whether openSUSE or the blog site owner is the publisher (not a desirable situation as you then also get liability for any slip-ups) or whether the author (or person who puts the material up) is the publisher. I don't know. I believe (UK law here) also that if OWN use material from a site within the licence granted by that site, and it subsequently turns out that the material had been used without permission by the original site, then all we would have to do is take the material down when notified, or request (and hopefully receive) permission. That's assuming we can prove that the source from which we took the material seemed to grant us a licence to use the material. If not, then we may get whacked for breach of copyright. So we need to keep records of the source and the licence granted at the time the material was taken. Some countries have laws about fair usage, usually automatically granting a limited licence to copy limited parts of a work for education, research or criticism purposes. These fair use provisions are not universal, and in some countries (I believe the UK is one such) are "custom and practice" but not, strictly speaking, within the letter of the law. I suggest OWN approach a good IP lawyer for a bit of pro-bono opinion about open-source blogs and newsletters. Yours David -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-project+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse-project+help@opensuse.org