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RE: Copyright [cgf, please comment]


Karl,
Thanks for your questions.

> KPH> I am not sure about it.
> KPH> The point of dispute is someone taking prior work and 
> rewriting and
> inserting his
> KPH> copyright notice and authorship, intentionally omitting 
> and refusing to
> KPH> incorporate major part of existing work which points to 
> that his work
> is borrowed KPH> from others.  That is a copyright infringment itself.
> 
> I agree. This isn't okay.

Thanks.

> This discussion is the reason for me, to read more about 
> copyright, GPL etc.
> 
> In the last two hours I've read a lot of wpages about this 
> difficult topic.
> 
> Of course, there are partly big differences in the copyright 
> of the nations.
> 
> I think now, the most human (including me) have only an ambiguous
> imagination,
> what copyright is.
> 
> In U.S. there is a distinction between copyright and 
> authorship, but not in
> Germany,
> IMO.


Well, I am not going to go into legal discussions.  Every country has its
own laws.
My point of objections are based upon several things.

1) In an open source project, we need to accommodate everyone.  Giving CVS
access
does not mean one starts changing things on his own.  My request to "Do not
do
any major changes to FAQ" was due to a reason to avoid conflicts, because I
knew
people will object.  If you read his arguments that mine is Cygwin/Xfree86
Frequently
Asked Questions and current is Cygwin/Xfree86 FAQ, is a baseless intentional
argument
to walk around someone else work intentionally and claim it yours own.
These kind of
arguments points to someone being unreasonable and unfair in his dealing.

2) For this project I did not insert anyone name on HTML pages, as authors.
The pages
belong to project.  But when one developer comes in and starts modifying web
pages
and without a prior consent from other contributors inserts his name as BOLD
FACES author and copyright
ower, it is going to create objections from others.  First of all this
starts giving feeling to
other well deserved contribtors that their contributions are being neglected
or not being properly
acknowledged.  Everyone made an effort to make this project successful, not
one person.

3) No matter how good are the contributions, I am strongly opposed to anyone
dictating 
his terms and things should go his way or no way.  This attitude irritates
me because it
creates unwanted arguments and waste of time.

> 
> The german copyright says, if there are various co-workers of 
> a work, every
> co-worker
> has a right to "co-copyright" (German: Miturheberschaft).
> Okay, it is a litte bit simplified, ...

I know, European laws to some extent.  I did my Ph.D. in Vienna.

> 
> I can understand Harold, that he has bad feeling, that the 
> copyright of the
> faq
> belongs to RedHat only.

No one said FAQ belongs to RedHat only.  I said FAQ does not belong to him.
Read his Draft FAQ, the introductions part is borrowed from current FAQ and
books,
which he includes happily because general introduction can be copies from
anywhere,
but he had been either  vague or refuse to incorporate more techincal points
from
current FAQ because that makes it clear the work is borrowed.  It is like,
you publish something
in a news paper and I come take your article, rewrite it with HTML sofwtare
and publish it
in SGML claiming to be mine.  This is absured.

> 
> My question regarding "The Cygwin/XFree86 FAQ"
> 
 http://www.cygwin.com/xfree/faq.html

>is:

> 1. RedHat has the copyright to this faq, doesn't it?

NO.  There was never a copyright issue about FAQ.  FAQ belongs to
Cygwin/XFree86 project,
neither me, Rob, Peter or anyone else.  it is a collection of answers and
possible solutions
collected from users suggestions, observations and from Xfree86 manual
pages.  No one copyrighted it.
It was the mess Harold started, though I requested no major changes, he
still attempted to change it
and try to claim it as his own work.  It is a nonsense. Current FAQ belongs
to our project,
if you have suggestions, email to list and Rob will add your suggestions.
That is the way FAQ was
prepared.


> 2. If so, has RedHat allowed any human the right to "recycling" of the faq
>    (comparable with the GPL for source code)?

If you want copy the current FAQ and distribute there is no license for it
GPL or whatever.
My intention was not to get into licensing and authorship mess for every
HTML document we
created to provide relevant information to users.  You can copy and do
whatever you like, as long as
you do not claim every single point in that FAQ was your brilliant idea, to
that I will object
and I will try to stop.


>If you answer the first question with "yes" and the last question with
"no",
>I've a very bad feeling, too!

I am not sure what is a bad feeling here.  The documents were there as
informational
and help tools to our users.  My aim was and is to provide an opensource
project
where authors get credit of their authorship of source code and we use
Cygwin/Xfree86
URL to support project, not as some school kids tools to dictates their
terms and start
inserting authroship at every page, and slowly looks like one person has
over taken the
entire project.


>Sometimes I've observed, that a human X is developing the freeware xyz.
>Many contributors send bug reports, suggestions, new ideas etc. After some
>months or years Mr. X decides, oh, now my software xyz becomes shareware.
>In my opinion this approach isn't really fair, because the development of
>the software, including the new version, has profited from the
contributions of
>the users.

Exactly, and Mr. XYZ is talking the idea from others and making his
copyright
and authroship property without getting their consent.  Cygwin/Xfree86 will
always
be a free sofwtare as long as I am here.  It cannot be shareware.  I will
always provide
binaries free of cost to anyone who has access to Internet.  My aim of
starting this project
was to provide a free X server to Win32 community.  From the beginning of
this project
I gave due acknowledgements to all the contributors, and in case of
authroship and copyright
issues I discussed with them privately and tried to find a best solution
which was acceptable
to everyone.  However, all the other contributors always discussed with me
prior to inserting
copyright and authorship notices, instead of being stubborn and start
porting things on their own.

I am closing this thread.  To avoid waste of time and protects all the
contributors and users
interest who had contributed to this project and will contribute I think it
more appropriate
to trash Harold FAQ then to publish it, because it will cause on-going
conflicts due to
unfairly taking others stuff and claiming it to be his copyright/aurthorship
 protected document, but nothing else.

Regards
Suhib

>greetings

> Karl

---
Karl Philipp

Phone : +49 6151 868 - 518
Fax   : +49 6151 868 - 980
eMail : mailto:karl.philipp@danet.de

Danet GmbH, Business Unit BI
Gutenbergstr. 10
64331 Weiterstadt, Germany
WWW : http://www.danet.de


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