[tei-council] Fwd: TEI licensing issues

Martin Holmes mholmes at uvic.ca
Wed Sep 14 11:31:01 EDT 2011


On 11-09-14 05:59 AM, David Sewell wrote:
> I'd just like to make a request/suggestion regarding copyright/licensing
> of the website in general.
>
> I think we should not implement any license that would make it possible
> for someone legally to, for example, copy all or most of www.tei-c.org
> to another host and mirror it with or without changes, with no
> permission from us. At the moment, most of the Web pages are protected
> by copyright (under US law at any rate), even though they do not bear a
> formal copyright statement.

I think if there are 50 sites all mirroring TEI material (as there are 
many, many sites mirroring various versions of the Guidelines already), 
then that's good for us. It would be of no benefit for anyone to mirror 
our content unless they were adding something useful to it (in which 
case, great), or they had found a way to make money from it (in which 
case, great, because that implies adding something that's worth paying 
for). Anyone can find their way back to The Source at tei-c.org with 
ease -- in fact, any mirror of TEI material that didn't link back to TEI 
would be pointless and useless.

It occurred to me to look at W3C practice with their standards. Their 
documents carry this:

<q>
Copyright © 2008 W3C® (MIT, ERCIM, Keio), All Rights Reserved. W3C 
liability, trademark and document use rules apply."

and their document use rules include this:

"By using and/or copying this document, or the W3C document from which 
this statement is linked, you (the licensee) agree that you have read, 
understood, and will comply with the following terms and conditions:

Permission to copy, and distribute the contents of this document, or the 
W3C document from which this statement is linked, in any medium for any 
purpose and without fee or royalty is hereby granted, provided that you 
include the following on ALL copies of the document, or portions 
thereof, that you use:

     A link or URL to the original W3C document.
     The pre-existing copyright notice of the original author, or if it 
doesn't exist, a notice (hypertext is preferred, but a textual 
representation is permitted) of the form: "Copyright © 
[$date-of-document] World Wide Web Consortium, (Massachusetts Institute 
of Technology, European Research Consortium for Informatics and 
Mathematics, Keio University). All Rights Reserved. 
http://www.w3.org/Consortium/Legal/2002/copyright-documents-20021231"
     If it exists, the STATUS of the W3C document.

When space permits, inclusion of the full text of this NOTICE should be 
provided. We request that authorship attribution be provided in any 
software, documents, or other items or products that you create pursuant 
to the implementation of the contents of this document, or any portion 
thereof.
</q>

<bibl>http://www.w3.org/Consortium/Legal/2002/copyright-documents-20021231</bibl>

This might be a model worth looking at.

Cheers,
Martin

> It would make sense to me to have a small general copyright statement on
> the home page to the effect that "Unless otherwise indicated, content on
> this website is copyright © The Text Encoding Initiative and may not be
> reproduced without permission. Content in certain sections of the site
> is subject to specific licensing; see page footers for details."



-- 
Martin Holmes
University of Victoria Humanities Computing and Media Centre
(mholmes at uvic.ca)


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