New subject: [opensuse-project] Re: License and copyright issues that openSUSE Weekly News team are coming up against now

25 Jan 2011

      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.

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?

* 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.

- 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/ _/_/
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[opensuse-project] License and copyright issues that openSUSE Weekly News team are coming up against now

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