[freeroleplay] Re: Discussion Digest, Vol 8, Issue 2

[Ricardo Gladwell]

On Sat, 2006-12-02 at 13:44 -0900, NekoIncardine wrote:
> > Date: Sat, 02 Dec 2006 15:58:57 +0000
> > From: Ricardo Gladwell <president at freeroleplay.org>
> > This Groklaw article it links to is much better:
> >
> > http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=20031231092027900
> 
> This article confuses me a bit, though you are at least somewhat
> correct in the definition.

Unfortunately, copyright law is not easy to understand properly.

> Further, it's 'open source myths' section
> responds only to the most FUD'dy of myths about OSS, a fact that has
> me a mite incredulous.

The myth retorts seem perfectly reasonable to me: many people have made
similar claims many times, and continue to do so on a regular basis.
Read Steve Ballmer's speeches or one the many discussions from
gnu.misc.discuss. You'll be amazed at what passes for criticism of open
source and free software.

> Perhaps most critically issuesome, it provides *no* information
> pertaining to the rights of an author who writes a program or book and
> then releases that output under the GPL. In other words, it provided
> me no clarification to my rights on my own creations or creations
> whose copyright is attributed to me.

It seems to do so in the Fundamentals of Copyright Law section. This
section clearly explains your rights as a copyright holder. Other than
copyright law, I'm not sure what other rights you are looking for?
You'll have trouble finding better advice on-line.

> For-profit use (i.e. in a released book), however, would be better
> suited to a royalty scheme (which is not only safer from the
> standpoint of the licensor in that you only pay based on how you
> succeed, but more profitable for those receiving the royalties).

If you intend to charge royalties for contributors work you should also
make this clear in the license and assignment agreement.

> True, as long as the requirements wouldn't require a separate page for
> each (as the GFDL seems to imply requiring).

As a quick aside, as far as attribution in the GFDL goes you only have
to keep 5 authors from previous modifications on the front cover, update
and maintain copyright notices (as per the GPL) and update the History
section with full attribution information. Otherwise, I don't think
there is any requirement to have separate pages for attribution.

> The GNU appears to be
> short on that, though, which should make it easier.

How do you mean?

> So far, looking
> through MySQL's source hasn't let me find the assign.txt, though...
> Unless I downloaded the wrong file.

I'm not sure the MySQL actually has an assign.txt, but other projects
do. My (brief) examination of the MySQL web page could not uncover their
copyright assignment process. It might be worth asking the FSF for a
copy of their copyright assignment form.

> This is true. I changed that section to "some rights reserved as
> written in the numbered sections below", and moved 3 (the details on
> the GPL) to a non-numbered section, adding:

Similarly, "some rights reserved" is probably not appropriate. The
simplest and clearest thing would be to copy the default GPL copyright
notice text and use that. Or, examine the copyright notices for other
dual-licensed works and see what they say.

> All other rights (meaning, primarily, the right to closed
> distribution) are reserved.

I'm not sure, but the right to "closed distribution" is not a right as
such.

In these situations less text is more, preferably copied from
authoritative sources. You should probably not be writing your own legal
text unless you are sure you know what you are doing.

> > > 1) All VGRPS-related work is free 'software'; you can use it,
> > > redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General
> > > Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation; at this
> > > time, this is version 2.0 of the license, however, an "or any later
> > > version" clause may be added to this upon review of the final version
> > > of the GNU General Public License, version 3.0.
> >
> > Again, not all VGRPS-related work will be free: won't the indie-game
> > based works will be proprietary VGRPS-related works? Please see my
> > remarks on "literal truth" above.
> 
> Again, true. I slightly modified it to include "as seen in the
> repository" to cover this base (snce the indie-game based works would
> not be on the repository except for those few sections in genericized
> form that are freed).

I'm not sure if "as seen in the repository" is clear. It is better to be
plainly truthful and simply make it clear that not all VGRPS-related is
free, but that VGRPS itself is free content (or software). In fact,
there is probably no need to talk about VGRPS-related works at all.

> I
> sincerely thank you for your assistance in helping me flesh out my
> idea of how to handle the copyright, as it has been an immense help in
> figuring out what I need to do to make this idea work as I intended.

No problem.

Kind regards...

-- 
Ricardo Gladwell
President, Free RPG Community
http://www.freeroleplay.org/
president at freeroleplay.org