On Fri, Jun 24, 2011 at 04:14:32PM -0400, Pamela Chestek wrote:
The U.S. statute defines the elements of a copyright notice, which
are the ©
symbol, the word "Copyright" or the abbreviation "Copr.," the year of
first
publication of the work, and (the critical question here) "the name of the
owner of copyright in the work, or an abbreviation by which the name can be
recognized, or a generally known alternative designation of the owner." So
keeping in mind that from a legal perspective it really doesn't matter much if
we have a copyright notice, and that there is latitude in how one identifies
the owner, I would vote for "Fedora Project Contributors." I think that's
accurate for the purposes of the statutory requirements and, since the actual
names are available on a contributions page, it is more than enough to identify
the authors for those people who use the copyright notice as a lead for finding
the actual copyright owners.
I'm okay with that.
As pointed out by others, for those using content under the CC-BY-SA
license we
should state clearly somewhere how we would like the attribution.
This is already done in the default Fedora docs CC BY-SA notice by
designating the Fedora Project as the "Attribution Party" (a term used
in CC BY-SA 3.0). I suppose we could be clearer about what that
actually means.
I also agree with Richard that we should carve out the copyright in
the logo
from any license grant.
Yes, the original intent of the current notice language was to
indicate that but I think it can be made clearer.
The entire legal notice actually needs to be revisited because of the
FPCA too (I assume contributors to docs are typically in cla-done or
whatever it's called). The idea of Red Hat being "the licensor of this
document" may have made sense under the old Fedora CLA regime but I
think it does not make sense under the FPCA (because the inbound
content license is now CC BY-SA by default).
- RF