2011/1/25 Satoru Matsumoto <helios_reds@gmx.net>:
Hello mates,
we, openSUSE Weekly News (OWN) team are now facing license and copyright issues. There are some things which are not clear to us. Although most of the issues affect just OWN, I think those issues should be shared by whole project.
Sascha, editor in chief of OWN have proposed that we should publish OWN under CC BY-SA 3.0 license [1].
@Sascha Please explain the reason why you think it is better to publish OWN under that license including: * What kind of benefits can we expect by applying CC BY-SA 3.0 license? * Why should we apply CC BY-SA 3.0 instead of other similar licenses?
<Explanation from Sascha>
The CC BY-SA helps us to give a clear License with clear Restriction. If we publishing under CC BY-SA or another CC License everyone can use our Weekly News, write anything from his content, and republish it.
And BTW: Ubuntu and Fedora Newsletters are under CC BY-SA too.
BTW2: But this is set on the bottom of every Site inside the normal Site.
The GFDL which is used by openSUSE is a good License too. But it is needed to paste the whole License inside every new produce. If we're using CC then is a Link enough.
</Explanation from Sascha>
What are the points that are not yet clear enough? # Please do not confound copyright with license.
* For contents on Wiki, license is clearly specified: "All content is made available under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License version 1.2 ("GFDL") unless expressly indicated otherwise."[2] But how about contents on other *.opensuse.org sites?
* Can we include contents, of which licenses aren't clearly mentioned, in OWN and publish under CC BY-SA 3.0 license? Or, should we "expressly indicate otherwise" the license of each article, even if the article is from news.o.o, lizards.o.o, lists.o.o and planet.o.o? (If we should do so, we have to "expressly indicate otherwise" the license of almost every article, because most of the articles now on OWN are from those sites or external news sites or private blogs. But if 90% of the contents are not under CC BY-SA or any other clear license, do we really need to publish OWN under that license?)
* Which country's copyright law and guidelines should we refer to?
<from Sascha>
In Germany we have the "Citiation Law", who says, that everyone can paste from every written document into a new one. But it can't be used for the whole document, just for a citiation (Maybe 3 Paragraphs or so...) Exists any similar Law in other Countries too?
</from Sascha>
* Can current drawing (citation) from external sites or personal blogs be considered "legitimate"? (This is closely related to the above question.)
- As far as I refer to Japanese copyright law and guidelines, our current style doesn't meet the requirements for "legitimate quotation".
- For example, if AuthorA wrote an article titled "About B" on SiteC that says "I love cats. In particular, I love kittens, because they are so cute! But some don't like cats." ...
-- Our current style: "SiteC/AutherA: About B" - "I love cats. In particular, I love kittens, because they are so cute! (...)" cannot be considered legitimate quotation. This style may be considered "reprint" and if there is a mention "all rights reserved" on the original SiteC, we are not allowed to reprint except otherwise specially permitted.
--- And this means, that we cannot "reprint" articles from *.opensuse.org except Wiki (contents on Wiki are published under GFDL), because we can read the mention "© 2010 Novell, Inc. All rights reserved." on the bottom of each page on those sites.
-- If we introduce the original article like: "SiteC/AutherA: About B" - In this article, AuthorA is making out "I love cats. In particular, I love kittens, because they are so cute! (...)". I totally agree. I think kitten is the most cutest animal on earth! -- this can be considered legitimate quotation.
# Therefore, Ubuntu people don't just "copy & paste" parts of articles from external sites in their Weekly News. When they introduce an article from external site, they are going to write an introductory article by themselves and include citation from original article in it.
* How can we solve these problems?
- Can we ask Novell to apply CC BY-SA 3.0 license for every content on *.opensuse.org including Wiki? If that'll be OK, most of the problems will be solved.
-- In that case, do we need Contributor License Agreement [3] to explain that all the contributed documents on *.opensuse.org will be published under CC BY-SA 3.0 license?
-- But still, how we can deal with articles which are aggregated on planet.o.o wouldn't that clear. Will all the authors accept that their articles will be published under CC BY-SA 3.0 license?
* How should we deal with articles from external sites in OWN? Alternatives may be:
- We won't introduce articles from external sites anymore.
- We will just introduce sites name, authors name, title and link URL with short comment (For example: "In this article, the author explains how to ...") by editors.
Sascha can you please give further information about external sites? What I would like to know is if I write an article in my blog an blogspot am I an external site or you refer as external sites sites like Linux format and Softpedia?
- When we introduce an article from external site, editor will write an introductory article for that as Gertjan does for Forums section now. (I think this is the best option. But in order to do so, we need much more help.)
We need all those points to be clear. Suggestions and proposals are welcome.
[1] http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/us/ [2] http://en.opensuse.org/Terms_of_site#Copyright_notice [3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contributor_License_Agreement
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
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