Re: A restrictive(?) LDP License

[Gary Lawrence Murphy <garym@canada.com>]

>>>>> "D" == David Lawyer <bf347@lafn.org> writes:

    D> ...  Thus if someone presents a doc to the LDP and
    D> the license does not allow free copying and distribution
    D> (copying is implied by "freely redistributable") then the LDP
    D> rejects it.  This rule in force right now and has been for some
    D> time.

Would all this be easier to manage and enforce if these terms of the
licence were turned around and applied as a contract with the authors
rather than the consumers?

We are speaking of a contract to the reader/publisher; in many
countries, a contract is not binding if there is no 'signed'
agreement, and "by reading this, you agree" is pretty fuzzy ground.

Is it totally outside to propose instead that if a writer wants to
list an article in the LDP, they must accept the LDP copyright
requirements?  If those requirements are minimal to satisfy the LDP
agenda, and if a document cannot get in without guessing these terms
;) then such a contract is not going to disuade anyone who would not
be disuaded anyway.

I am no lawyer, but it wouldn't it be easier to display a contract
saying simply "By placing your documents into this archive you are
agreeing to grant copyright permissions X Y and Z" --- woudn't the
author's deliberate act of submitting the doc becomes the binding
gesture to seal the contract?  

Yes, this amounts to the same result, but it avoids having to labour
over each and every submissions' favourite subgenius of copyright
blurb to decide its fate.  If you drop your paper on the LDP, it is as
least as free as specified in the LDP licence.  No questions, no
negotiations.  All we need prove in court is that the author who
'signed' was the rightful owner in the first place.

Certainly, an author is still free to make their licence even more
free (eg grant modification rights), but anyone fetching a file from
the LDP is assured the minimum freedoms outlined in the LDP licence.
Instead of our trying to guess all scenarios, we need only distill
the rules down to the few which would bar a document from inclusion.

An author can also keep alternate editions and fork an open branch by
merely dropping it off at the LDP site: Like MySQL and Mozilla,
commercial docs might also be "en-rived" (is that the antonym of
'derived'?)  into an open LDP edition from commercial sources, but the
licence ensures they cannot move the other way.

-- 
Gary Lawrence Murphy <garym@canada.com>  TeleDynamics Communications Inc
Business Telecom Services : Internet Consulting : http://www.teledyn.com
Linux Writers Workshop Archive: http://www.egroups.com/group/linux-hack/
"You don't play what you know; you play what you hear." -- (Miles Davis)


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