[sword-devel] For ALL On The List: Copyright Considerations, What do you think?

[Daniel Glassey]

Hi Jonathan :)
I'm not sure that that solution is complete. IANAL so I don't know if 
it would be required or sufficient to exempt Crosswire for any 
liability for misuse of the modules but it makes sense to force 
people to read the rights granted and click an 'I agree' button 
before they are allowed to download them whether through the web page 
or through installmgr. 

I guess just displaying that info on the ModInfo.jsp with an 'I 
agree' button to download would do it.

I don't know if that would help educate people or if people would 
just click through blah blah ;)

Even if we did that people could still download the modules directly 
from the ftp site so I don't know if anything needs doing there.

(Modules with full unrestricted rights should still be downloadable 
without having to click through though it might be nice to let people 
know their rights with those modules anyway).

Another thing that is possible but probably overkill is some kind of 
flag in the conf file to say whether it can be used on a website or 
not. Diatheke and the perl or php bindings could check that flag and 
refuse to display it. (It would be easy to get around so probably 
wouldn't be worth it but otoh it would force people to actively 
modify the software or modules to get around it)

Regards,
Daniel

On 9 Jan 2003 at 22:46, Jonathan Hughes sent forth the message:

> We need to educate the people that are using our software on the
> copyright issues that are involved in them using each of the modules we
> have. I am concerned that with many organizations starting to grant us
> permission to distribute their works but with minor (or major)
> restrictions some users will download a module thinking they have all
> usage rights but they will use it in a way that was not granted to us.
> For example we just got permission to distribute the Finnish 1992 Bible,
> but in the publication permit they gave us, they state "The text is
> intended for research and studying purposes. The text may be retrieved
> to the personal workstation but copying and re-distributing is strickly
> forbidden.. For other use than personal research, teaching and studying
> a separate license by the [ELCF] is required." So we have the right to
> have people download it from our website and use it on their personal
> computers, however they can not put this specific module on a CD and
> re-distribute it and including this modules on our free CD and having
> people re-distribute does not appear to be within the rights we were
> given. People that setup a website to display text might also not have
> the right to use this module in that way...because it says for "personal
> research, teaching and studying" and it specifically says that it may be
> "retrieved to the personal workstation." It does not give the right to
> being put up on a server. A good SOLUTION to this would be to add the
> distributionlicense and distributionnotes fields from the .conf files to
> be displayed with the other module information in ModInfo.jsp. This way
> anyone that downloads the modules from the info page can see the
> specific license that govern their usage (a note to Chris or Troy if you
> get ambitious and set this up soon I would like it if you augmented the
> copyright.conf file that is in the root directory of the /copyright/
> directory on the web server to get the latest copyright information that
> has not made it to individual modules .conf files. This way the
> copyright information is synced between the module pages and the
> copyright pages for a module.) A link to the copyright website to get
> information about the specific module might be in order also (ie add:
> "For more information about copyright issues with this module see the
> copyright information for the KJV on the Copyright Website." to the
> ModInfo.jsp page also) These two suggestions I would highly recommend
> that we add as soon as possible (I can get a patch to ModInfo.jsp soon
> after Troy or Chris okay this).
> 
> It might also be useful to add some kind of notification on the
> ModDisp.jsp pages where it lists the modules to download because users
> can just download the modules from that page without seeing any of the
> specific information.
> 
> Some way to inform users that they should look into the copyright issues
> with any modules they use would be a benefit to the community that we
> serve. Ideas of how to do this would be appreciated. Something like a
> awareness program. :)