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Dear ecos-maintainers, FYI, I forward a probably relevant discussion from the SPI list. The comments of Ted Ts'o seem very relevant to me. How does the Redhat Copyright assignment stand to this discussion (on "imdenification") ? Also note the Ted explicitely suggests using a corporation (and not a not for profit) for holding Copyright, because it is much more capable of defending itself and holding the _persons_ non-liable. e.g. in Belgium, all members of a not-for-profit, like the badminton club that I am a member of, are all, fully and individually liable if a player would get hurt, when playing without insurance, this covers both the "organizers" of the club, but even all individual members. Sorry I did send the full text (dont' know how to get the pointer to this quickly). Hope this helps, Peter
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- From: Branden Robinson / SPI Treasurer <branden+spi-treasurer at deadbeast dot net>
- To: Jonas Oberg <jonas at gnu dot org>
- Cc: spi-general at lists dot spi-inc dot org
- Date: Mon, 24 Feb 2003 23:38:28 -0500
- Subject: Re: [Spi-private] IRC log from 2003-02-04 SPI Board meeting
- References: <20030206224433.GY17341@deadbeast.net> <873cmesq4b.fsf@polgara.coyote.org>
Hello, Mr. Oberg: I am forwarding this message to the spi-general list for discussion among our membership. Thanks for writing! On Sun, Feb 23, 2003 at 09:23:32PM +0100, Jonas Oberg wrote: > Hi Branden, could you forward this to whoever is appropriate? > > I read from the IRC log from the board meeting of the 4th of february > that the SPI is considering accepting "copyright assignments", similar > to those that the Free Software Foundation North America uses. > > This seems like a good idea to me and I encourage it. I would however > also point you to http://www.fsfeurope.org/projects/fla/ which is the > Fiduciary Licence Agreement (FLA) developed by the FSF Europe in > coordination with, among others, Eben Moglen. > > It addresses the same issues as the Copyright Assignment that the FSF > NA uses, but is crafted in a way that allows it to be used also for > the continental European Droit d'Auteur authorship tradition, which is > different than the anglo-american copyright system used by the US. > > The FSF NA is currently looking at using the FLA, or some derivative > thereof, for their own "copyright assignments", but they have not > decided yet and it is a low-proprity issue since the normal "copyright > assignments" work well enough. > > If the SPI would accept similar contracts, I would recommend that you > have a look at the FLA. I believe that it will be more useful for you > than the older "copyright assignment" contracts. Please see the web > pages for more information, and email fla at fsfeurope dot org with any > questions. They can also assist you if you would be interested in > using the FLA as a contract for the SPI. -- G. Branden Robinson, Treasurer Software in the Public Interest, Inc. treasurer at spi-inc dot org http://www.spi-inc.org/Attachment: pgp00000.pgp
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--- Begin Message ---
- From: Theodore Ts'o <tytso at mit dot edu>
- To: spi-general at lists dot spi-inc dot org
- Date: Tue, 25 Feb 2003 12:54:36 -0500
- Subject: Re: [Spi-private] IRC log from 2003-02-04 SPI Board meeting
- References: <20030206224433.GY17341@deadbeast.net> <873cmesq4b.fsf@polgara.coyote.org> <20030225043827.GM11626@deadbeast.net>
One comment about the U.S. versions of such a copyright assignment. I would strongly suggest that any such legal wording be similar to the one which the FSF accepted from IBM when IBM donated the s390 changes to the binutils package: http://sources.redhat.com/ml/bug-binutils/2000-q3/msg00000.html ... and not based on the default templates distributed by the FSF. In particular, the offending words which you will note the IBM lawyers removed from the assignment agreement referenced above are: "... I hereby indemnify and hold harmless the Foundation, its officers, employees, and agents against any and all claims, actions or damages (including attorney's reasonable fees) asserted by or paid to any party on account of a breach or alleged breach of the foregoing warranty." Why is this bad? An explanation can be found at this web page: http://ohwg.cap.gov/jag/indemnify.html. In part: "Indemnification means you agree to step into the shoes of the person you have agreed to indemnify and suffer in their place whatever consequences they were to suffer because of something happening (literally to protect them from being "damned"). That includes financial suffering - paying the bills to repair or replace damaged things; paying the judgment a court assesses them for injury to a third party; sometimes paying a fine levied against them; anything short of imprisonment for their own direct criminal conduct. Anyone want to bet their own house and savings?" A good rule of thumb is that any time you see a legal agreement with the word "indemnify", that should be an immediate red flag, and you should ideally refuse to sign such an agreement before getting competent legal advice. If I'm going to write software, and donate my efforts and my intellectual property the Open Software community, that's my choice. I've done this on many occasions. But one thing that I will NOT do after making such a free donation of my efforts is to sign something which explicitly puts my house and all of my savings at risk. If IBM refused to put its corporate assets at risk when it donated the s390 binutils changes to the FSF, why should I risk mine? As a result, I will refuse to donate code to any project which requires me to sign an agreement with similar language. - Ted _______________________________________________ Spi-general mailing list Spi-general at lists dot spi-inc dot org http://lists.spi-inc.org/cgi-bin/listinfo/spi-general
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--- Begin Message ---
- From: Michael Banck <mbanck at gmx dot net>
- To: spi-general at lists dot spi-inc dot org
- Date: Wed, 26 Feb 2003 01:28:46 +0100
- Subject: Re: [Spi-private] IRC log from 2003-02-04 SPI Board meeting
- References: <20030206224433.GY17341@deadbeast.net> <873cmesq4b.fsf@polgara.coyote.org> <20030225043827.GM11626@deadbeast.net> <20030225175435.GB2802@think.thunk.org>
On Tue, Feb 25, 2003 at 12:54:36PM -0500, Theodore Ts'o wrote: > If I'm going to write software, and donate my efforts and my > intellectual property the Open Software community, that's my choice. > I've done this on many occasions. But one thing that I will NOT do > after making such a free donation of my efforts is to sign something > which explicitly puts my house and all of my savings at risk. If IBM > refused to put its corporate assets at risk when it donated the s390 > binutils changes to the FSF, why should I risk mine? As a result, I > will refuse to donate code to any project which requires me to sign an > agreement with similar language. Fair enough. But on the other hand, I guess SPI has to decide whether *it* wants to take up any risks and stand up for whatever code it accepted. What happens if some company decides they have a patent on something and tries to sue us into oblivion? MichaelAttachment: pgp00001.pgp
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--- Begin Message ---
- From: Sven Luther <luther at dpt-info dot u-strasbg dot fr>
- To: spi-general at lists dot spi-inc dot org
- Date: Wed, 26 Feb 2003 10:02:06 +0100
- Subject: Re: [Spi-private] IRC log from 2003-02-04 SPI Board meeting
- References: <20030206224433.GY17341@deadbeast.net> <873cmesq4b.fsf@polgara.coyote.org> <20030225043827.GM11626@deadbeast.net> <20030225175435.GB2802@think.thunk.org> <20030226002845.GA1054@blackbird.oase.mhn.de>
On Wed, Feb 26, 2003 at 01:28:46AM +0100, Michael Banck wrote: > On Tue, Feb 25, 2003 at 12:54:36PM -0500, Theodore Ts'o wrote: > > If I'm going to write software, and donate my efforts and my > > intellectual property the Open Software community, that's my choice. > > I've done this on many occasions. But one thing that I will NOT do > > after making such a free donation of my efforts is to sign something > > which explicitly puts my house and all of my savings at risk. If IBM > > refused to put its corporate assets at risk when it donated the s390 > > binutils changes to the FSF, why should I risk mine? As a result, I > > will refuse to donate code to any project which requires me to sign an > > agreement with similar language. > > Fair enough. But on the other hand, I guess SPI has to decide whether > *it* wants to take up any risks and stand up for whatever code it > accepted. What happens if some company decides they have a patent on > something and tries to sue us into oblivion? We say we didn't know and remove the code ? Friendly, Sven Luther _______________________________________________ Spi-general mailing list Spi-general at lists dot spi-inc dot org http://lists.spi-inc.org/cgi-bin/listinfo/spi-general
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--- Begin Message ---
- From: Theodore Ts'o <tytso at mit dot edu>
- To: spi-general at lists dot spi-inc dot org
- Date: Wed, 26 Feb 2003 09:58:20 -0500
- Subject: Re: [Spi-private] IRC log from 2003-02-04 SPI Board meeting
- References: <20030206224433.GY17341@deadbeast.net> <873cmesq4b.fsf@polgara.coyote.org> <20030225043827.GM11626@deadbeast.net> <20030225175435.GB2802@think.thunk.org> <20030226002845.GA1054@blackbird.oase.mhn.de>
On Wed, Feb 26, 2003 at 01:28:46AM +0100, Michael Banck wrote: > Fair enough. But on the other hand, I guess SPI has to decide whether > *it* wants to take up any risks and stand up for whatever code it > accepted. What happens if some company decides they have a patent on > something and tries to sue us into oblivion? Well, life is full of tradeoffs. One advantage of a distributed copyright ownership is that it makes life a lot harder for some company who has a patent on something to sue someone into oblivion. To take a concrete example, which would get elicit more world-wide sympathy, and which would be harder to do? 1) For an big, multi-billion dollar U.S. company to sue an innocent 17-year boy in Norway, under Norwegian laws? (Replace 17-year boy with 26-year old Russian with two children, aged two-and-a-half and three months for another example.) 2) Or for that same company to sue a faceless non-profit corporation which most people (and certainly all non-geeks) haven't heard of before, in a U.S. courtroom? Think about that, for a moment. If you want to protect the assets of the SPI, then contact a good lawyer, and ask him/her to help you set up a subsidary, or sister corporation to hold the IPR that you're so interested in centralizing, but which otherwise has little to no assets. It needs to be separate enough that lawsuits against it can't pierce the corporate liability shield, but which SPI (and other non-profit organizations) could choose to funnel money to it via donations if it needs to defend itself in court. (Or such organizations could donate legal help directly to specific cases, as the EFF has done from time to time.) The bottom line is a good lawyer should be able to help the SPI use corporations they way they were meant to be used; to help individuals to duck out of being held personally liable. It's important to remember that the same legal rules that allow a company to be sued for millions for making coffee too hot also has provisions that allow rich people to shield their personal wealth from much of that liability. If the SPI wants to do something like centralize copyright holdings (and I'm really not convinced it's worth it), the least it can do is to use similar techniques to protect individual open source contributors' assets as much as possible. - Ted _______________________________________________ Spi-general mailing list Spi-general at lists dot spi-inc dot org http://lists.spi-inc.org/cgi-bin/listinfo/spi-general
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