[gentoo-trustees] [Fwd: Re: Gentoo Foundation copyright assignment document]

[John Davis]

-----Forwarded Message-----
From: Kevin Howard <khoward@×××××××.com>
To: zhen@g.o
Subject: Re: Gentoo Foundation copyright assignment document
Date: Fri, 30 Jul 2004 17:02:04 -0700

John,

I apologize for the delay in sending you this. My contact at the EFF 
said there had been several other responses to your initial request, so 
hopefully you have been able to follow up to one of those. Let me know 
if you have not had further contact from the EFF and I'll contact them 
again.

I've taken some time to review your initial email, the copyright 
assignment document and the gentoo.org web site, along with some other 
web resources such as the text of the GNU GPL
(http://www.opensource.org/licenses/gpl-license.php) and Debian's Social
Contract (http://www.debian.org/social_contract).

As I mentioned in my previous email, I am licensed as an attorney only
in the State of California, and therefore cannot give legal advice
concerning the specifics of the construction of Gentoo Foundation's
copyright assignment contract. Specifically in light of the concern
outlined by the Trustees about "the entire document being tossed in
court" it would be best if an attorney licensed in New Mexico reviewed
the assignment document for consistency with New Mexico law.

What I can do is give you some general thoughts about the concerns of 
the trustees. Questions about how specific to be, the enforceability of 
the assignment, and international contract issues should be able to be 
dealt with by the Trustees working together with the help of a New 
Mexico-licensed attorney familiar with entity formation. These are all 
preferences the Trustees should be able to hammer out into specific 
terms for the assignment document.

I don't know how non-profit organizations are registered in New Mexico, 
but I did find that "Gentoo Technologies, Inc." is still a valid, 
registered corporation name in New Mexico and that the whois results for 
the gentoo.org domain name shows that Gentoo Technologies, Inc. is the 
registrant. Whichever name the Trustees choose to use for the 
organization, make sure to be consistent across all documents, contracts 
and other identifying material, including the web.

One thing the organization may want to consider doing is something like
what Debian does with what it calls "non-free" works. They include a
"non-free" area in their archive for works whose authors want to
maintain the copyright or patent on and do not make such "non-free"
works a part of the Debian system. See item 5 here:
http://www.debian.org/social_contract

In the same vein, Debian also reserves the right to restrict files from
being included in their archives at all if such inclusion would cause
licensing or distribution problems. See:
http://www.debian.org/doc/debian-policy/ch-archive.html#s-pkgcopyright

I hope this helps, and good luck with the Gentoo Linux project.


-Kevin Howard



John Davis wrote:

> Kevin -
> Thank you again for your time. First, here are the points of contention
> as raised by the Gentoo trustees:
>
> * It claims ownership of developer hard drives "...or computer media
> relating to the Work.")
>
> * It says "Gentoo Technologies" instead of "Gentoo Foundation"
>
> * It is completely unenforceable for any user (non-dev) that submits
> something to bugzilla and/or submissions@g.o.  (we're not
> requiring them to sign this doc, so it's not enforceable) [1]
>
> * Because we allow the storage things like kernel patches, etc. for
> which we do not own the copyright, in CVS (in the files/ directories),
> it shows that we're selectively enforcing the copyright assignment.  In
> the past, this has often resulted in the entire document being tossed in
> court.
>
> * It is questionable whether or not we have any legal right to enforce
> copyright claims for non-US devs.  They're not US citizens, so it's not
> clear if they're subject to US copyright restrictions/assignments.
>
> * We selectively enforce who must sign it.
>
> * [minor] http://www.gentoo.org/proj/en/devrel/copyright/index.xml needs
> to be updated to remove Daniel from the text.
>
> 1. Since we are a community driven project, we often times accept
> software patches from non-developer (not affiliated with Gentoo) users
> and incorporate them into our tree. We usually do this two ways. The
> first way is to have users mail their software patches to
> submissions@g.o. From there, the patch filters down to the
> correct people. The second method is to have the user post the software
> patch to our bugtracking system at http://bugs.gentoo.org. The same
> process follows from there.
>
> The Copyright assignment document can be found at
> http://www.gentoo.org/proj/en/devrel/copyright/assignment.txt.
>
> I look forward to hearing from you.
>
> Regards,

-- 
John Davis
Gentoo Linux Developer
<http://dev.gentoo.org/~zhen>

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