Re: GNU FDL License on Mutopia

[Bernd Warken]

On Tue, Feb 20, 2001 at 05:59:48PM +0100, Han-Wen Nienhuys wrote:
> I still don't understand what you mean by "stealing".

I can see 3 kinds of theft:
- illegal theft: stealing against the law (occurred to Jaon Sankay)
- legal theft: getting something that belongs to someone else by using
    legal tricks (holes or unclear situations in laws, e.g. weak
    licenses).  That's what we try to impede.
- immoral theft: patenting or selling something that does not belong to
    anybody, e.g. robbing America from the Indians, selling acres on the
    moon, patenting the mouse-click or human genes.

Legally spoken, only the first kind is theft.

> keep in mind that we're still talking about content which is PD
> originally.

Maybe we are thinking the same, but use different words.  We use PD
for two different meanings.  I spoke about PD in the legal sense, i.e.
the American law regulating the Public Domain.  This law does not exist
outside of the USA, moreover it turned out that this legal concept has
serious flaws.  So putting something under PD means feeding the wolves
with your work.

You seem to use PD in the sense I would call "free".  Unfortunately, it
is not easy to ensure that a work with intended PD content will
actually remain in this state.  It must be protected be a free license
that can withstand "legal theft" attacks.

> I think there has to be a very good reason, and I mean
> very very good reason for encumbering PD content with extra
> restrictions. The moment you impose something like FDL on music, you
> restrict many other legitimate uses of the music.

FDL does not impose anything on music, it just protects your own work
and garantees it to stay free.  It explicitly allows commercial and
noncommercial usage.  Maybe you were confused by the regulations for
large quantities.  But these are optional in the sense that they can
be deactivated by using "no Front-Cover Texts,..." in the legalize as
outlined in the addendum of the FDL.

The historical prejudice that GNU copylefts impose something unwanted
comes from the fact that GPL does not allow to develop software using
a library put under GPL.  But for this situation, the GNU LGPL was
created.  So there are no restrictions in the GNU copylefts as a whole.
>
> If I understand correctly, the scenario you are talking about is
> someone taking the music (whose editorial marks are the only non PD
> part), changing those, and redistributing only printed versions.

Yes, that is one possible scenario.

> * a lawyer also doesn't give you certainty: legal "certainty" is
>   derived from court decisions, and the outcome depends just as much
>   on how much the opponent is willing to spend on a lawyer (In other
>   words: how much the opponent can gain from winning).

That's true, but there are some American lawyers with an experience of
15 years in free software trials.  Chances are that it will be a lot
harder to crack them.
>
> * Mutopia is in good company. Both CPDL (www.cpdl.org) and the famous
>   Gutenberg project (www.promo.net/pg) impose no restrictions on the
>   content they provide.

So you are talking about bad company ;-)
>
> I invite you to come up with a better license, but it can only be
> acceptable for mutopia if, in spirit, it puts the content in the
> "public domain".

Ok, I'll give it a try, tho I'm not a lawyer and really hate legal stuff.
I'll start with changing the FDL to reflect music
instead of documentation and will send the result to the FSF for
further processing.

Does anybody have experience with the recording and/or performing aspects?

If someone in the discussion list wants to help we should communicate
via private email <address@hidden>.

Bernd Warken