Re: [tsc-devel] Licensing handling (was: Signing-off commits on legal questions)

Quintus | Sun, 08 Feb 2015 12:47:19 UTC

Luiji Maryo <…i@u…> writes:

> I'm not a lawyer, so I'm trying to avoid any discussion of what
> copyright law permits from this point on, but that Chinese copyright
> factoid was particularly interesting.

I was exaggerating. I have no idea what Chinese copyright law permits or
not. Though I suspect it might not allow copyright in any sense
different from “right to copy everything”. :-P

> I believe that it is fine to put the resource works under a different
> license than the executable works, primarily based off the fact that
> this doesn't seem to be uncommon. See [1]

Luiji, you are invaluable. Thank you so much for that list (from which
TSC is still missing!). I was aware many projects practised that, but as
always you don’t find one when you want to show that. This gives me
final confirmation my estimation of the legal situation of the game as a
compound work is correct. 0 AD for example uses two conflicting licenses
for code and content — GPLv2 and CC-BY-SA — which would be impossible if
the game was to be considered a single work, and it’s a very large and
well-funded effort. Similar case with MegaGlest. (Btw. I’ve played both
games but sticked with MegaGlest as 0 AD was too hard for my graphics card
when I last tried it a year ago or so O_o).

Good. At least one thing finally clarified. Aaah.

> The logo can easily be protected as a trademark in a similar fashion
> to Firefox, where though it is still considered free and open source
> software, you'd need to change it in derivatives.

Because the logo is not part of the sourcecode, it can be licensed in a
different way. Trademarking it goes one step further. Copyright is
something attached to a specific work. However, it might happen that
somebody who never heard of Firefox creates a program with a logo that
has some fiery fox. That second logo is not an adaption of the Firefox
logo, in fact, it is totally unrelated. Assuming he can prove that, it
does not constitute a copyright infringement. This is correct, because
copyright only protects your rights on a specific work, if somebody
creates something unrelated, it would be nonsense to make your work more
important than his work. _Trademarks_ on the other do not protect a
specific work. They protect an _identity_. Their scope is much wider,
and therefore registering a trademark requires an official act in form
of insertion into a public register where everyone can look into to see
whether such an identity already exists as the trademark would forbid
you use of the fiery fox logo in the above example although it was
totally unrelated to Firefox. Copyright, at least under European
jurisdictions, does not require an official act and is not registered
anywhere.

There are other rights such as design rights (just think Apple
vs. Samsung on imitating hardware look or user interface layout) or
patents, that, together with copyright and trademarks, form a group of
rights commonly known as the “intellectual property”.

As far as trademarking the term of “The Secret Chronicles of Dr. M.”
itself is concerned, we can do that, but rather not now. Keeping up a
trademark costs an annual fee, and doing so in all the countries on the
world will result in quite some costly fee.

> I'm unaware of a method to protect the music, however.

We need a sublicensing right. If we have that, we can freely decide who
can use the music and who not. I only wanted to do this for the title
music, though, all the other music can be under CC licenses.

Valete,
Quintus
-- 
Blog: http://www.quintilianus.eu

I will reject HTML emails.     | Ich akzeptiere keine HTML-Nachrichten.
                               |
Use GnuPG for mail encryption: | GnuPG für Mail-Verschlüsselung:
http://www.gnupg.org           | http://gnupg.org/index.de.html