[OPEN-ILS-DOCUMENTATION] Updating Attributions

[Dan Scott]

On Tue, May 17, 2011 at 04:03:55PM -0400, Jason Etheridge wrote:
> > As one of the 18 "yes" votes to that proposal, yes. If task #4 ('Past
> > contributors to the Documentation Wiki should be notified by emails sent
> > to Evergreen community mailing lists and to the email address associated
> > with their docuwiki account of the new licensing terms and given a
> > reasonable amount of time to request that their contributions not be
> > included under those licensing terms') happened, and there were no
> > refusals, then we should be in reasonably good shape. (We could stand to
> > add an explicit footer on the wiki stating that all contributions are
> > licensed under CC-BY-SA, of course).
> 
> I think task #4 having happened could only help if there is ever a
> legal dispute, but I don't think it gave us any right to re-license
> another copyright holder's material, if that's what anyone thought.

Jason, you are correct by definition: only a copyright holder can
license their work. The process that was adopted a year ago was an
designed to get assent from copyright holders to license their work.

Any approach that we adopt, you would be able to argue that we're doing
something wrong forever - it's copyright, after all, and you live in the
land of big payday lawsuits, so I'm sure you could find a lawyer who
would be happy to take a shot at the filthy lucre held by the fat cats
at the Evergreen project - but given an effort in good faith to inform
previous contributors of our intentions and of our interpretation of
what they intended by contributing to the wiki in the first place, and
giving them an opportunity to withhold their consent to an explicit
license going forward, I think we're on reasonably good ground. 

Of course, you'll never get a definitive legal answer that process X is
the perfectly safe correct approach to moving forward, it's all about
gauging an acceptable level of risk. So are you genuinely worried about
the risk of legal proceedings, or is something else bothering you and
this side thread is just the symptom? We seem to have quickly veered off
your original question, which was about providing explicit attribution
for large works that were incorporated into the documentation.

Some precedents for this kind of relicensing move (never an exact match,
of course):

 * http://iquaid.org/2009/07/06/why-relicense-fedora-documentation-and-wiki-content/
   * (Strengthened by a contributor licensing agreement clause)
 * http://groups.google.com/group/mozilla.legal/browse_thread/thread/e8e99f2152f4f911#
 * http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia#Content_licensing
   * (Using the FDL 1.3 exception to relicense from FDL)
 * http://popey.com/blog/2011/03/08/ubuntu-wiki-relicensing-request-for-comments/
   * (Canonical claimed copyright over the entire content of the wiki)
 * http://www.wlug.org.nz/WlugWikiRelicensing
   * (Interesting approach to getting assent from wiki authors on a
      per-page basis for all collaborators on a given page)
 * http://wiki.debian.org/DebianWiki/LicencingTerms/Proposals
   * (In progress - and exceedingly thorough, as is the Debian way)

Again, if we haven't gone through the process of contacting previous
contributors (I suspect we have not) / broadcasting this on the mailing
lists / blog, then there is still some work to do on the due diligence
front.
 
> > For what it's worth, I bet the bulk of the copyright holders who
> > contributed to the wiki prior to January 7, 2010 could be counted on two
> > hands (and consequently asked if they object to the incorporation of
> > their content into the Evergreen documentation under an explicit
> > CC-BY-SA license). Also note that we could ask GPLS to explicitly
> > license any work performed by their employees prior to that date, given
> > how copyright in the US is by default assigned to the employer. After
> > that - how much do you realistically think would be left?
> 
> Doesn't seem insurmountable.  Who's our copyright coordinator again? :)

I'll be happy to contact GPLS. And I've already assented to licensing my
own contributions under the CC-BY-SA 3.0 Unported.

What are you going to do to help resolve this issue?