[mizar] Fwd: License for MML

[Josef Urban <josef.urban@gmail.com>]

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Lionel Elie Mamane <lionel@mamane.lu>
Date: Tue, Feb 23, 2010 at 12:29 PM
Subject: Re: License for MML


On Mon, Feb 22, 2010 at 07:57:52AM +0100, Petr Pudlak wrote:

> I also looked at GFDL v1.3 FAQ [5]. According to this, GFDL v1.3 allowed
> the content to be re-licensed under CC-BY-SA under certain conditions.
> However, if I understand it correctly, this was only possible until
> August 1, 2009.

> [5] http://www.gnu.org/licenses/fdl-1.3-faq.html

This clause was put in specially for Wikipedia. Wikipedia was in its
beginnings "GFDL version 1.x or later", with x an integer between 0
and 2 unknown to me out of the top of my head. They wanted to migrate
to a creative commons license (for reasons I don't remember exactly;
probably because most other wikis were under a CC license and they
wanted to make it easier to copy/paste from a wiki to wikipedia and
vice-versa). This required permission from every copyright holder (and
because wikipedia went the "license" way and not the "copyright
assignment" way, this means every contributor), which was a huge task,
basically impossible. So they worked around it with the FSF by putting
the relicensing in the new version of the GFDL (subject to a positive
vote by the wikipedia community).

Which leads me to my view of the "every contributor licenses" vs
"copyright assignment" debate:

 - "copyright assignment" should hold in some shape or another in
  every jurisdiction. After all, that is how Hollywood movies and
  mainstream books are published :) In some jurisdictions (e.g. large
  parts of continental Europe, which use the "authorship right" /
  civil law and not the copyright / common law), some rights attached
  to a work are not transferred in a "copyright assignment", but they
  should not pose any problem in our community: they are e.g. the
  right to be recognised as the author of the work (eventually under
  a pseudonym), a right we usually don't intend to give
  away... Another example, the right to oppose that your work is
  changed in a way that damages your honour or reputation.

  The "copyright assignment" system works only if the whole community
  agrees on a trusted party to assign the copyright to. That's a big
  "if". The main advantage is that if experience (or the world having
  changed twenty years from now) shows that the license is
  suboptimal, that trusted party can by unilateral decision change
  the license (he/she can obviously ask for input from the community
  before doing that; the trusted party can be a membership-based
  organisation that decides by voting; membership can be "any
  contributor that applies" or something else).

  It also allows the trusted party to act in court against
  infringements with a clear status. The recent Linux history shows
  this is less necessary than was feared: people that had copyright
  over "only" something like 0.5% of Linux still successfully sued
  (in Germany) people that misused the whole of Linux, because their
  0.5% were being misused, so they had clear status to act in
  court. In our community, I don't see the typical contributor being
  interested / willing / able time-wise and legal knowledge-wise to
  act, while maybe something like a "Mizar contributors association"
  would.

  The big psychological barrier is that the contributor *loses* the
  rights he has to his own work. The trusted party can, obviously,
  immediately give him a license that allows him to do anything with
  his own work, so that in practice he loses very little: essentially
  only the right to forbid third parties to use it, but if he submits
  to the MML, he intends to abandon that right anyway...

  See e.g. http://www.fsfe.org/projects/ftf/fla.en.html for a worked
  out way to do copyright assignment in an IMHO reasonable way: the
  copyright assignment and the "trusted party gives unlimited right
  to his own work to contributor" is in the _same_ agreement and
  forms a unique act, which cannot be separated. Psychologically
  better :) This agreement can obviously restrict the trusted party
  to license the work only under free licenses...

 - "every contributor licenses directly" has the opposite advantages
  and disadvantages: people that don't trust the chosen party still
  feel free to contribute (they feel in power over their own work),
  but the initial choice of license is nearly irrevocable: one cannot
  change without permission from each and every contributer (unless
  one removes his/her contributions), so one better choose
  carefully.


--
Lionel