Re: New HOWTO

[David Lawyer <dave@lafn.org>]

On Fri, Nov 17, 2000 at 09:42:44AM -0500, David Merrill wrote:
> I just wrote to the author (Marcus Faure) to see if he plans on updating
> it and maintaining it.
> 
> It is released under *no* license. Yep, no license or copyright mentioned
> at all. What kind of legal standing does that give it? Is it in the public
> domain? Or, as I seem to recall, is it automatically copyrighted under US
> law even without a copyright statement, and therefore dead if we can't
> contact him?

Please read the LDP-License:
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
		   LINUX DOCUMENTATION PROJECT LICENSE (LDPL)
			     v2.0, 12 January 1998


I. COPYRIGHT

The copyright to each Linux Documentation Project (LDP) document is
owned by its author or authors.


II. LICENSE

The following license terms apply to all LDP documents, unless otherwise
stated in the document. .....
--------------------------------------------------------------------------
This means that until we seemingly gave up on the LDP License, that
any submission to us that didn't have a license was covered under the
LDP license.  Now an author could claim that they didn't know this rule
but we could claim that:

1. They never asked us what the rule was.
2. Since they should know that we put our docs on the Internet, they
are implicitly permitting distribution and copying of their document.

The default of the LDP license was to allow modification.  So in that
case anyone is free to modify it.  But the author could claim that
they never agreed to that.  If they implicitly agreed to allow copying
and distribution but not modification, why didn't they say so?

At any rate I think we all agree that any docs submitted to us from now
on MUST have a License (or state that they are public domain).

			David Lawyer


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