Re: [Fsuk-manchester] Video of the FSUK talk from the 19th February

[MJ Ray]

Dave Page <address@hidden> wrote: [...]
> I'm not sure what you mean by a "free software license".

For example, the WTFPL is at http://sam.zoy.org/wtfpl/ (its author is
the current Debian Project Leader, did you know?)

No Problem Bugroff license is at http://tunes.org/legalese/bugroff.html

You know they make sense.

By the way, I watched the video on my TV (fun interference between
bluetooth remote and the video transmitter) and it seemed like a good
talk.  A bit surprised by some things, like how few people have asked
Broadcom for drivers.  Production quality seemed fine, except for the
points already noted in the video and that the logo, captions and some
of the typing were off the edge of the TV screen, in the overscan area.
I hope these get linked into the lug.org.uk index of talks and
material currently under discussion.

Right, I'm going to go off the deep end now, about how CC isn't free
software, how the 2.0 UK and 3.0 licences are broken and so on.  If
that isn't your bag, please stop reading here, but I hope it won't
upset many people because IIRC Richard Stallman won't promote CC
either, for reasons that I agree with (implicit co-promotion of the
-NC and -ND ones).

> Certainly the
> Creative Commons Attribution Sharealike license used gives you the
> following freedoms: [...]

No, it doesn't.  It lets two people upgrade it to one that does
(through clause 2.3), but why doesn't FSUK-M'c'r just release under
one instead?

You've mentioned the source-availability problem, but I expect we'd
work around that if the source files are needed for modification (I
already noted that I suck at video work today, so I don't know).

A bigger restriction on freedom is that the 2.0 UK porting includes
the "this is not part of the licence" trademark terms on the parent CC
licence page into the main body of the licence.  You can see
something's wrong because section 7 is very similar to the notice at
the end.  It was probably someone starting with "Select All", "Copy",
"Paste" which lost the colour+border+html source comment which was all
that marked the end of the licence (a Web Accessibility sin).  The
same thing happened to some books too, which say they're under CC 2.x,
but are actually under some bastard child of CC and the CC trademark
notice. debian-legal hunted down a few and persuaded people to
relicense during CC 2.x, but there's probably more.

That means the copyright licence claims to expand the scope of the
trademark into things not normally covered by trademark law (I call it
a "supertrademark") and requires all users to obey the supertrademark,
pay up and surrender freedom to use the CC mark in legal ways which
aren't explicitly permitted.  Is that valid?  I don't know, I'm not a
lawyer and it chills me.  Some people tell me it's "copyright abuse"
but I've not seen that in most law texts.

Anyway, the trademark terms (and especially the "Creative Commons
retains full, unfettered, and sole discretion to revoke this trademark
license for any reason whatsoever or for no specified reason" bit
which would make it rather difficult to tell people what licence)
might not matter to people who don't criticise CC and we might think
that CC would never try to use the revocation clause on us, but what
unnecessary freedom-payment terms would we accept for free software?

Thou shalt not flame Nokia?

You agree to pet a cat?

Also, who here read CC's trademark terms before agreeing to them as
part of that CC 2.0/uk copyright licence?  Anyone?

(Don't feel bad.  They're not exactly prominent on their web site.
They're linked in the CC footer under "Policies" but not on the
licence pages that refer to them.)

The 2.5/scotland licences avoided this mistake (we're allowed to
upgrade to this) and CC's own site got clearer marking in 3.0 (a
bloody big subhead saying "Creative Commons Notice" to make it clear
the licence text has ended).  I think both of those happened after
debian developers showed examples of how people were botching CC use,
but we're not in Scotland and people want a local licence, so the
English keep using the buggy 2.0/uk one. *sigh*

You might think everyone can just upgrade to 3.0.  However, 3.0
includes a TPM ban (instead of GNU GPLv3's elegant "this is not a TPM"
move), which I think might make interesting problems for copying the
video onto some DVDs, so CC's still all screwed (YMMV).

And does anyone else find the no-op "Any of the above conditions can
be waived if you get permission from the copyright holder" notices
irritating?  That's even true of a Microsoft EULA!

OK, rant over.

Regards,
-- 
MJ Ray http://mjr.towers.org.uk/email.html tel:+44-844-4437-237 -
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