Re: Document License prohibits profiles?

Le jeu 04/11/2004 à 00:18, Lofton Henderson a écrit :
> Is it legal for an individual or group to write a profile of a Rec which 
> contains the Document License [1]?  That license says:

FWIW, the right mailing list to ask this question is site-policy@w3.org
(non publicly archived). I give my opinion on this, but this may be
completely bogus since IANAL.

> I think a profile is certainly a derivative work of its base standard -- it 
> defines a subset of the base standard.  Is it a derivative in the sense of 
> the Document License?

Definitely.

>   I don't know.  One would hope that the Copyright FAQ 
> [2] would say something like "Profiles are okay, as long as they clearly 
> distinguished themselves from the base REC."

I don't know that W3C as a whole would want that.

> It is not unreasonable to interpret the Document License in such a way 
> that, for example, an industry group could NOT define a technical graphics 
> profile by basing it on SVG Basic, as suggested in the 4th paragraph of 
> SVG12 [3].

Not only it's not unreasonable, I think it's also one of the goals of
the Document License (i.e. I don't think W3C want other groups to take a
part of its specifications and do something that would go against the
spirit of the spec). 

I agree the profiling case based on rules defined in W3C specs is a very
interesting case that would probably deserve some exception mechanism,
and I suggest you get in touch with site-policy@w3.org to see whether
this is reasonable... (if you do so, please cc me)

Dom

> [1] http://www.w3.org/Consortium/Legal/2002/copyright-documents-20021231
> [2] http://www.w3.org/Consortium/Legal/IPR-FAQ-20000620
> [3] http://www.w3.org/TR/SVG12/profiling.html
-- 
Dominique Hazaël-Massieux - http://www.w3.org/People/Dom/
W3C/ERCIM
mailto:dom@w3.org