Sorry I didn't respond to this sooner. As Richard suggests, we should make sure that the copyright license doesn't inadvertently extend to permit the use of the trademarks. My suggestion would be something like:
The text and illustrations of this document are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported license. FEDORA and the Fedora Infinity Design logo are trademarks of Red Hat, Inc., registered in the U.S. and other countries. For guidelines on the permitted uses of the Fedora trademarks go to [link]. All other trademarks are the property of their respective owners.
I also point out that the current notice on the Fedora documentation says "All other trademarks /and copyrights/ referred to are the property of their respective owners." To me, mentioning that there might be other copyright owners in the notice only creates questions, because it might cause a downstream user to wonder whether the CC license applies to the entire work. Assuming we don't have anything that can't be licensed CC-BY-SA, then we should eliminate the confusion (and if we do have stuff that can't be licensed that way, then we have bigger problems).
Pamela S. Chestek Senior IP Attorney Red Hat, Inc. 1801 Varsity Drive Raleigh, NC 27606 919-754-4473 pchestek@redhat.com
Date: Mon, 3 Aug 2009 12:55:55 -0400 From: Richard Fontana rfontana@redhat.com To: For participants of the Documentation Project fedora-docs-list@redhat.com Subject: Re: License Change... Publican
On Mon, 3 Aug 2009 12:28:13 -0400 Eric Christensen eric@christensenplace.us wrote:
On Mon, Aug 3, 2009 at 12:24, Paul W. Frieldsstickster@gmail.com wrote:
On Mon, Aug 03, 2009 at 12:15:57PM -0400, Eric Christensen wrote:
So we need to be able to display the information found on the CC Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 United States page[1]. Does anyone have any recommendations on how this is displayed?
Display where? You mean in documents that have been built? Wouldn't that just be a change in the publican-fedora package to the /usr/share/publican/Common_Content/fedora/*/Legal_Notice.xml files?
Yes, which is what I'm talking about. We need to change that text. Do we want to include the CC graphic there as well?
From an existing doc:
This material may only be distributed subject to the terms and conditions set forth in the Open Publication License, V1.0
to: This material may only be distributed subject to the terms and conditions set forth in the Creative Commons BY-SA, v3.0, license.
I would recommend changing the text further than that. That language is taken directly from the OPL:
Proper form for an incorporation by reference is as follows: Copyright (c) <year> by <author's name or designee>. This material may be distributed only subject to the terms and conditions set forth in the Open Publication License, vX.Y or later (the latest version is presently available at http://www.opencontent.org/openpub/).
My recommendation:
This document is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported license.
That can probably be improved on. Also, you may wish to specify how you want attribution to be given.
As a separate note, but raised in my mind because of this license change, perhaps the subsequent reference to Fedora trademarks in this Publican legal boilerplate should be accompanied by a pointer to the Fedora trademark guidelines (to clarify that the stylized Fedora mark and the Fedora infinity logo aren't themselves being licensed under CC-BY-SA).
- RF
On Wed, 19 Aug 2009 13:53:24 -0400 Pamela Chestek pchestek@redhat.com wrote:
I also point out that the current notice on the Fedora documentation says "All other trademarks /and copyrights/ referred to are the property of their respective owners." To me, mentioning that there might be other copyright owners in the notice only creates questions, because it might cause a downstream user to wonder whether the CC license applies to the entire work. Assuming we don't have anything that can't be licensed CC-BY-SA, then we should eliminate the confusion (and if we do have stuff that can't be licensed that way, then we have bigger problems).
Eek, I hadn't noticed that before. I see that in at least some of the documentation at docs.fp.o (installation guide, security guide). That's indeed undesirable for the reasons Pam mentions. In Ruediger's sample document containing the new notices,[1] the trademark sentence correctly does not add "and copyrights".
[1]http://rlandmann.fedorapeople.org/license/
- RF