data "copyright" or not -- what is Debian's take? (original) (raw)

Hi Debian Legal Experts,

N.B. yes -- I use 'experts', and you do not have to be certified, nor a diplomaed attorney. Since everything is relative, you might just have an expertise I am lacking, thus being experts for my sake. Enjoy the title ;-)

In the light of my veiled (never said here that it to be applied to data) question about appropriateness of custom attribution with CC BY-SA 3.0 license, and further communications on cc-community list: http://lists.ibiblio.org/pipermail/cc-community/2011-January/005825.html I wonder now what actually to recommend people willing to share data, so later on it could be uploaded to the Debian archives without problem (I already had 1 package rejected due to missing copyright statements for the included datasets).

Should I advise to blindly attach a copyright statement and license, possibly copyrighting non-copyrightable, thus committing "Copyfraud" in some jurisdictions?

What would be the take of Debian ftpmasters whenever they receive a package shipping data without clean copyright/license statement and something like this instead:

This data has been collected 2010 by Author1, Author2. Please recognise the substantial effort that went into the collection of this data by attributing the authors. Attribute by citing the original publication: Author1, Author2, Title of the paper, where published, 2010, URL: http://....

Or should I advise to use the text of MIT license, verbally and explicitly describing possible uses and disclaiming any warranty? but once again without any copyright statement.

Thanks in advance for your feedback,

=------------------------------------------------------------------= Keep in touch www.onerussian.com Yaroslav Halchenko www.ohloh.net/accounts/yarikoptic

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