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

On Tue, 25 Jan 2011 at 14:06:49 +1100, Ben Finney wrote:

I don't see a need to specify “data”. What's wrong with “work”, the term normally seen in English-language copyright discussions for any information covered by copyright?

Since the issue under discussion is things that might or might not be covered by copyright, I wasn't sure whether "work" as legal jargon implies "copyrightable thing" (and hence isn't applicable to non-copyrightable things); avoiding the term presumably sidesteps that :-)

Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person
[... and the rest of the usual MIT license text]

Where “the usual MIT license text” presumably means the more precise “terms of the Expat license”.

Yes, I meant the Expat license (or in fact, what I really meant was "insert the terms of your favourite permissive license here", but the Expat license is a good choice).

So long as the terms are as I specified above, I think that's a good strategy also, but it is only effective if done by the copyright holders (not unilaterally by a third party).

I don't see how anyone who isn't the copyright holder[1] could offer a license for material that might be copyrightable, but yes, it's worth emphasizing that.

S

[1] by which I really mean: "entity who would be the copyright holder if the work was copyrightable, which it might be, or not". Superpositions of states are hard to talk about precisely :-)

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