Re: Modification of reference material
On Fri, 16 Apr 1999 13:43:28 +0200, Marcus Brinkmann wrote:
>> I was thinking more along the line of "If you make modifications, please send
>> them to us for review. If we approve of them, we'll add them to the official
>> distribution and give you appropriate credit. Otherwise, you must <see
>> above>."
>
>The wording above is good. I am careful, because if you say "You _must_ send
>them to us for review", it would be non-free
Well, it seems unreasonable to me to demand that all changes be sent to us. I
hadn't even realized it would actually make the license non-free.
>> >Of course you can also say only the very original, unmodified version is
>> >allowed to carry the official name. As long as some form of derivation is
>> >possible, it is very likely dfsg free (although there are some minor
>> >caveeats to avoid. Nothing too serious, though).
>>
>> The name WDG nor "htmlhelp" is a registered trademark (like Netscape, Mozilla
>> and TeX are), so that would be a bit hard to enforce.
>
>It would not be enforcable by trademark law, but pretty much by copyright
>law. You can't prevent that other people create other original works under
>their copyright under the names "WDG" and "htmlhelp", but you can control
>derivatives of your work as much as you like.
Fortunately, we haven't had any conflicts about other people using our name,
so that's not an issue. I don't think we have any problems with people
redistributing the references under our name with changes, as long as it's
clear that they and not we made those changes.
>So you can request that your logo is not removed from the front page, for
>example. However, there should also be the possibility to take only parts of
>the reference for inclusion in other Free projects, and then such clauses
>become troublesome (what if I only want to use a small portion of your text
>in an ASCII environment. Then I can't display logos...)
Well, it's all HTML text, so the logo is included as an image with
alternative text. A text browser will show the text "Web Design Group"
instead of the logo. And if you want to use a small portion of our text,
you're citing from our work, so that's already covered in copyright law (you
must give us credit, not cite more than necessary, etc). If you take the
text, and strip the name/copyright, etc., then you're in trouble.
Ok, anyway, I think it's pretty clear for us now what we can do. We'll draft
up a license and once that's done, we'll get back to you. Thanks for all the
feedback!
Greetings,
Arnoud
--
\/ Arnoud "Galactus" Engelfriet - galactus@stack.nl This space
5th year Business & Computing Science student left blank
URL: http://www.stack.nl/~galactus/ PGP: 0x416A1A35 intentionally.
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