Re: W3C Excerpt and Citation license

Ted Guild <ted@w3.org> wrote: [...]
> For instance, a concern [3] in the case of Open Standards is that
> derivative works might threaten interoperability. [...]

I feel that the best way to preserve the integrity of your works is to
require unapproved derivative works to carry a different name (not a
particular name, just a different one).

The best way for people to verify the integrity of copies of your
works is for you to sign them with a public key tool like GnuPG.

http://www.w3.org/Consortium/Legal/IPR-FAQ-20000620 seems to assume
that copyright is the only tool which can be used for the integrity
of specifications and doesn't seem to mention trademarks or digital
signatures in the context of W3C Documents.  As far as documents are
concerned, that seems mostly a copyright FAQ.  Copyright seems a poor
tool for this to me... it's like there's this copyright hammer and
it's being used to tighten up the integrity screws, resulting in
minor-but-significant damage to the public wall.

Using copyright to refuse users the freedom to adapt the work to their
needs, or to limit derived works and discriminate against fields of
endeavour, will mean that your Standards may be Open, but they
wouldn't be includable in Free and Open Source Software.

The licence which has been emailed to this list seems to limit derived
works and discriminate against fields of endeavour.  This may be an
improvement, but it still doesn't seem usable in FOSS projects, as far
as I can tell.  Could you change the copyright licence to be less
restrictive in the ways outlined above and make W3C documents
includable in FOSS, so we can share them more freely, please?

I am a debian developer and a member of various cooperatives but this
is expressing only my personal view at this time.

Hope that helps,
-- 
MJR/slef
My Opinion Only: see http://people.debian.org/~mjr/
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Received on Friday, 6 March 2009 20:15:47 UTC