Slashdot Mirror
Ask Slashdot: A GPL-like Copyright Tagline for Text?
murrayc asks: "I need a short GPL-like copyright message to put on the end of my online articles. I'm no lawyer so I don't know what would be valid. I recently discovered that a commercial site had ripped-off one of my web pages word for word. Compare my article with their copy. They removed any mention of me or my web site and put their copyright on the end of it. When I complained they added my name to the top of the article, but they still have their copyright notice on it, saying that people have to ask their permission before copying it. I don't want to prevent anyone from copying my articles, but I want to retain control over them. No, the articles themselves won't be of much interest to Slashdotters." It was only a matter of time until the digital version of the plagarism spectre reared it's ugly head. What's one to
do if they want to protect their content, yet still make it available
to all?
Actually, you own the copyright, whether you put notice on the article or not. You should INSIST that they put your copyright notice on your article, and add "Used by Permission". If they refuse, ask them to remove your article from their site. If you have trouble, hire a lawyer to send them a "bark letter", wait a while, and call them again. A bark letter should cost you $25, $50 at most.
Disclaimer: IANAL
RMS and ESR worked on this license which is specific for text. It is the textual equivalent of the GPL.
With a GPL like license, it would be "sticky" and apply to derived works of your article as well, right? But how is that defined for writing: that it's OK for someone to cut a paragraph here or there from your article as long as they allow people to do the same from their's?
Would an article be derived work if you are referenced as a source (I guess not, since IP doesn't apply to ideas)? What about if you were quoted?
I agree with you that something like this should be in place, I have also seen things I have written popping up elsewhere (though not as bad your example). Maybe you should check the with the IDG people who are working on the "Open Book" on Linux??
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Read the question again: he does want people to be able to copy his works, but he does not want them slapping their own, restricted, copyrights onto them.
This is not supporting intellectual property (un-)rights, but trying to circumvent the problems they are causing.
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A friend of mine is working on this very thing, called the OpenContent License. Their FAQ:
1. Why do we need the OPL?
Computer software can already be made free for public consumption and improvement by distribution under one of several Free Software licenses as mentioned above. If you're developing executable code with instructional potential, please consider licensing it as "Free Software" so that it can both be a part of the Bazaar development cycle and freely accessible to everyone. Other Content (Learning Objects) such as graphics, images, sound bytes, video clips, models, lecture notes, tutorials, HOW-TO's and anything else that can be "referenced during technology supported learning" can not be released under these licenses because they are written specifically for computer software. The OpenContent License has been created to provide instructional designers and content specialists the same benefits, protections and assurances programmers gain from Free Software licenses. The OPL (pronounced "opal") is always open for comment. This version draws inspiration (and some verbiage) from the GPL and Debian's Social Contract.
2. Where did you get the idea that people would be willing to give their work away?
(I'll do my best to refrain from restating the question as "What kind of idiot would actually consider sharing? What kind of idiot would actually expect anyone else to share in return?") If you can honestly ask this question, it seems clear that you have never used the internet. What do people do on the internet more than look for information and find it? and find it available for free? Have you never looked anything up online? You may want to review the project's purpose. Although this idea may seem crazy to those entrenched in academia or higher education (or those who are just greedy), the idea of working hard and freely sharing the valuable results has been in practice for a long time, and is the essence of the Internet ethic (if you don't subscribe to these ideals, maybe you should go on somewhere else.) Richard M. Stallman played a key role early on in the Free Software movement by writing out and evangelizing the idea. He has included Some Easily Rebutted Objections to GNU's Goals in the GNU Manifesto. He answers questions like 'why should software be free?', 'why would anyone do all that work for free?', "won't programmers starve?', and others there. The transfer from the computer programming paradigm to that of education should be easy enough. For a better understanding of the principles underlying OpenContent's organization please read around the Free Software Foundation and Eric S. Raymond's OpenSource.org.
3. How do I get involved?
1. read the OPL
2. agree with its tenets or make suggestions
3. create Content
4. make it freely available under the OPL
5. spread the word
You are entirely in the right here, the company is in infringement. Don't let them waffle and don't be pushed around.
Thanks
Bruce Perens
Bruce Perens.
A line like this should do the job:
(C) 1999 John Smith. Contact John@Smith.com for permission to reproduce this article under an open source license.
Okay, it doesn't quite fit on one line, unless your browser is real wide. But then when someone contacts you, you can hit them with your choice of license. And the copyright notice will make direct ripoffs like happened to the Filemaker article illegal. You could leave out the part about "under an open source license" if you wanted it to be shorter, but that might discourage people who didn't realize how liberal a license you were offering. People who don't know what an "open source license" is won't be deterred.
Disclaimer: I Am Not A Lawyer. But I am suing someone for copyright violation, so I Am A Person Who Hangs Out With Lawyers.
--CarlF
Actually, unlike trademarks, you cannot lose a copyright by failing to defend it. There is, however, probably a statute of limitations on the actual offense, which is of course renewed each time it's exploited. Simply send them a cease and desist letter and tell them you hope that legal action will not be required. If that doesn't work, give 'em a lotta shit for PR if they're a company. Unless there's actual monetary damage, there's not any point in getting a lawyer though.
I've finally had it: until slashdot gets article moderation, I am not coming back.
While I am not a lawyer, I play one on the Net :-)
First of all, you have a lawsuit on your hands. You own any content you publish, regardless of form, as long as the work is original and the work is only yours: it doesn't include a substantial amount of work from someone else and you did not do it as a work for hire (meaning, you did not write the thing for an employer). The work does NOT have to have a copyright notice on it if it was written in any of the countries that have signed the Berne convention. (Which means most western countries.)
Note that you only have lawsuit if you can substantially *prove* that the work is yours and and that you published it *before* they did. One lawyer told me that the only way you can do this is by mailing the thing to yourself via registered mail: it will have a postmark on it proving the date of publication. OTOH, another lawyer told me that the only thing that this accomplishes is the wasting of the stamp and needless tying up of the postal system. I'm if you had 20 different lawyers on the subject, you would get 20 different opinions.
I don't think a whole license would actually be necessary for content. I think just a notice like:
Copyright (C) 1999 Rob A. Shinn
This text may be redistributed in unmodified form only, as long as this notice remains intact.
would suffice. While copyright notices are not necessary, they make it much, much easier for you to win a lawsuit. In fact, in most jurisdictions, it is impossible to win statutory damages without a notice. This means that your lawsuit could probably only win actual provable damages for this particular instance.
Unless of course you want people to modify and pass it along, akin to GPL. But, IMHO, this is a mistake: modified content can hurt the reputation of the original author far more easily than can modified, redistributed source code can.
Once again, disclaimer:
I am NOT a laywer. It is up to you to seek the counsel of a qualified, competent attorney if you indeed desire a truly useful opinion.
My sources for information include the Software Developer's Complete Legal Companion, by Thorne D. Harris III. This is an excellent work and you should consider getting it if you are interested in copyright law....
My journal has hot
The GPL or a GPL-like license is probably not appropriate for articles. The GPL is designed for software and particularly the modification of source code. Most articles, books, etc., are not intended to be further modified without the author's direct approval.
:-)
However, you can still make the article "Free". The BSD license would work well if you weren't concerned that some publisher could add further material to it and sell it. Giving it a tagline that prohibits the selling of your work would make it non-free unless you were very, very careful in your wording.
IMHO, just have the tagline announce the copyright and state that it can be freely copied and distributed as long as the notice is kept intact. See the bottom of this reply for an example
Arandir
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This post Copyright 1999 by David Johnson. Permission to freely copy and distribute this post is granted provided that this notice is retained.
A Government Is a Body of People, Usually Notably Ungoverned
By them posting thier copyright, they are purporting that they "own" the work as others would need thier permission to copy it.
This is time to take action. Legal action. You not only deserve the right that they post your copyright, since you own the work, but you should also demand compensation, since they are using your intellectual property to derive income through the ad rotation.
Some /.'s believe in IP and some don't. Some don't even realize that copyrights are IP. Eliminating intellectual property altogether would invalidate the GPL, a nice little paradox :-)
However, the post assumes that the author is keenly interested in his IP rights. Otherwise he would not have been concerned with someone else using his work "unfairly". After all, if it's not property, it can't be stolen. If you feel it's been stolen, then you must agree that it's property!
A post can be put under the public domain and then no one would ever be able to own it for themselves. However, they could change the wording a bit and then claim it. If you don't believe that information should be owned, then put your stuff in the public domain, otherwise you are inconsistant. But if you don't believe in IP, but continue to use the GPL, understand that many people will see you as inconsistant and maybe even hypocritical.
A Government Is a Body of People, Usually Notably Ungoverned
If you wish to allow people to modify the page (most of the time, this isn't needed), you might want to consider the licensing terms that apply to most GNU manuals. I don't have it at hand now, but you can probably dig it up yourself.
I've seen the OPL and it seemed incomplete or somehow too simplistic; so, I created my own rendition of the GPL that I call the Oasis Public License (because that's the name of the website for which I originally intended to use it). It can be shortened to OPL but I realize that that causes an acronym collision. :)
I wanted to be able to retain control of documents and yet allow people to copy and redistribute them similar in spirit to what the GPL accomplishes for software. The Oasis Public License is pretty much a wholesale conversion of the GPL to apply to documents with a few additions from other public licenses.
Under English law you automatically own the copyright to any original work - you do not even need to put a copyright line in any original works - although it does not hurt.
You should contact a solicitor immediately. They will charge you about 25 quid for a Cease and Desist letter. You should also file for a hearing in the High Court. As the website that has infringed your copyright is based in the US they will likely not wish to invoke the cost of instructing solicitors in England and will back down. If they do not answer the case you will definitely get Default Judgement in your favour. You are then free to pursue damages (likely fairly low) and court costs (if you get default judgement this is likely to be very low too.) Damages will be easy to obtain without messing around international claims as McLane Novea New Media very likely have some exposure within the EU.
Contact a solicitor ASAP - you won't make any money, but you will protect your copyright - and protect yourself from any copyright infringement claims by McLane - which would be pursued in US courts and likely be a LOT nastier...
Nick
-- "It's a sad day for American capitalism when a man can't fly a midget on a kite over Central Park" - Jim Moran
A few years back I wrote a smart-ass response to somebody on Usenet, snickered quietly to myself, and then forgot about it. A few months later I saw someone mentioning a funny rant in Wired that sounded suspiciously similar to what I had posted. I went over to a newsstand, paid $4.95, and saw my rant in the letters section, authored by "anonymous". At no time did I recall every giving Wired permission to publish my incoherent ramblings, so I checked around, posted to one of the law newsgroups, and even flamed a few people in alt.wired. The basic facts I established were: I have until something like 75 years after my death to sue them; I don't need a copyright notice; damages are mainly limited to proven commercial value (none, I will freely admit, and I would probably have given them permission *if asked*), and, when you get right down to it, Wired is for ding-dongs. During that time period, Wired was attracting large numbers of zealots who thought that a pink-and-green dead trees publication was somehow revolutionizing the online world, and that things like copyrights, honesty, etc., were obsolete. One guy even seemed to think that Wired was actually an extension of Usenet, and therefore the magazine could freely profit from whatever it could grab there. True, there are some questions as to where Usenet actually ends, since, even more than the web, it's a distributed, multi-copying system, but I'm sure most would agree it stops somewhere short of overpriced, advertisement-laden lifestyle magazines sitting in traditional newsracks. In any case I have something fun to do in my old age, should I ever get the desire to sue them.
---- "If we have to go on with these damned quantum jumps, then I'm sorry that I ever got involved" - Erwin Schrodinger
Quoting or referencing an article is "fair use".
Now here's some food for thought...in the same way, dynamically linking to a library is also considered "fair use" by many people, and if such a case ever makes it to a court, there is a good possibility that it will be determined legal to link to a GPL library! It can be justified as "fair use" since linking to a library is the whole purpose of the library, and in many cases, you aren't even including code at all, only a "#include ".
The same thing also goes for any proprietary dll's you happen to have laying around. You may not have any rights to distribute the proprietary library, but you can still dynamically link to it and distribute your own stuff.
A Government Is a Body of People, Usually Notably Ungoverned
>I thought Slashdotters didn't believe in intellectual property rights.
An incorrect assumption. The free software movement is *based* on the *use* of intellectual property rights, and on the belief that most current intellectual property rights are abused to the detriment of the community, and society as a whole.
Far from being against intellectual property rights, the GPL (and ALL other free software licenses (excluding public domain software)) *require* intellectual property rights. It is intellectual property rights that allow the author of a work to stipulate conditions on the use, modification, and re-distribution of a work. (for example, the advertising clause that, until recently, was required by the BSD license, or the many well known requirements of the GPL)
Free software isn't about abolishing intellectual property rights. It's about reforming the use of intellectual property rights. Intellectual property rights are supposed to be about benefitting society, and (to a lesser degree) about protecting small authors/inventors/programmers. Unfortunately todays legal/corporate environment has corrupted those laws to benefit deep pocketed mega-corporations, often to the detriment of small authors/inventors/programmers and society as a whole.
"Copyright Begins With the Author at Creation
At the time an original work is created in fixed form, copy-right
is automatically secured. At that moment, all the rights
in that copyright belong to the author of the work. Those
rights remain with the author unless the author specifically
transfers them, in writing, to someone else. Ownership of
the rights can change, but the author of the work remains
the same regardless of who subsequently owns the rights."
Get the entire thing from this PDF.
I think the OpenContent License, mentioned above, is probably the best solution to this guy's problem.
rooooar
If copyrights were eliminated then I could still "freely" close my source code. The purpose of the GPL is to keep the source code out in the open where people can use it. Without the copyright on the GPL then anyone can make it "nonfree".
In a world without copyrights I can take your source code, modify it, distribute it binary-only (with heavy copy protection), sell it, etc. Bill Gates can take GNU software and incorporate it into Windows (with heavy copy protection).
The only way around it would be to make the GPL and other former Free Software licenses into actual contracts. And forcing someone to sign a contract before they can use software is hardly up the FSF's alley.
A Government Is a Body of People, Usually Notably Ungoverned
Most people put a copyright notice on their work that also states that any copy must contain the copyright notice. This what I do on my documents (example: http:// www.robertgraham.com/pubs/network-intrusion-detect ion.html#copyright).
I go futher and track my document. I put a 1-bit GIF file embedded in my document that links back to my server. This tracks people who simply mirror the document through the Referer field.
Then, I put interesting spelling and wording in the document. This allows me to track the document via AltaVista and other search engines.
The philosophical standpoint here is that any document you create is the start of a meme. I use these techniques to shepard my meme through the web. From this perspective, the Copyright notice is important for works that you want to be essentially in the public domain: it still gives you control over the basic process.
> In a world without copyrights I can take your source code, modify it, distribute it binary-only (with heavy copy protection), sell it, etc. Bill Gates can take GNU software and incorporate it into Windows (with heavy copy protection).
Except that in a world without copyrights there would be no Bill Gates-s...
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Note that on technocrat.net I handle copyrights of postings differently than on Slashdot. Over there, when you make a posting you agree to sign a separate and independent copyright over to me, and you keep your own copyright - the effect is that I can do whatever I want with your posting, and so can you. This is so that I can reprint discussions, etc., without having to go back to the original poster. I've seen this dual-copyright scheme used once on software - it was in the contract when I wrote an iostreams library for Zortech. I don't know of another example of its being used for a discussion forum.
Thanks
Bruce
Bruce Perens.
Your post probably got reposted, say to rec.humor.best-of-usenet. Or somebody quoted it in a sig. And before you know it you have a GEN-you-wine Ann Landers Craig Shergold immortal bit of netlore ...
I doubt Wired (even today's craven Wired) would have printed your letter with the full knowledge that it was attributable to someone specifically. They're a company. They have lawyers. And whatever you think of them then (techno-weenies) or now (netbiz-weenies), they're magazine people, and magazines are actually a whole lot more cognizant of these kinds of issues than netfolk.
I mean, if they were printing it as "interesting found humor" I doubt they would have chosen to do so as a *letter*. That's pointless.
lake effect weblog
{Network engineer in Chicago--looking for work!}
Prove it. Show me one single precedent.
I've finally had it: until slashdot gets article moderation, I am not coming back.
Instead, they are *very* reluctant to enjoin any form of speech, instead almost always leaving it as a damages issue.
Just last week, Ford attempted to have a site shut down. They got an initial TRO, which lasted pretty much until the other side showed up. In fact, the judge ordered Ford to assist in the resuscitation of the site--at the same time cautioning the publisher that thie was *not* permission to publish the materials, and that doing so could leave him liable for additional damages.
The general rule on speech is to award damages, but not to restrain it (short of national security issues such as war-time shipping schedules [and you *really* have to wonder why the editor of that paper wanted to publish those--perhaps under a special "U-boats" heading?]).
hawk, esq.
I'd be surprised to see $25. Maybe $50 in an area where legal fees are around $100/hour, or maybe $50 beyond the cost of consultation (if there's a fee). In Las Vegas, I typically charged $100 (which was half my [then] hourly fee). If it was a very short consultation and a short letter, I'd probably apply the consultation fee towards it. More complicated issues, I'd tack it on after the consultation fee.
Keep in mind that a lawyer pretty much has to open and keep a file forever after sending one of these; it's not just five minutes on a typerwrite.
hawk, esq.
p.s. The suggestion below about sending a reasonable bill is a good one. $150 isn't out of line for a short article (about $200 for an op-ed piece in a large newspaper last time i checked). Paying it when clearly wrong costs them less than calling their own lawyer.
Apple drew heavily from NetBSD--and, contrary to GPL advocates' dire predictions, returned nice piles of bug fixes.
On another front, Caldera has decided that Wine has strategic value, and has *hired* a firm to contribute to that bsd license.