December 30, 2014

0x53: Can Plagiarism Happen Under Copyleft?

Summary

Bradley and Karen discuss what plagiarism is (or isn't) and how it interacts with copyleft licenses.

This show was released on Tuesday 30 December 2014; its running time is 01:16:43.

Show Notes

Segment 0 (00:00:37)

• Please donate to to send Dan to a conference. There's a progress bar on faif.us now.
• You can also donate to support Software Freedom Conservancy, where Bradley and Karen work, by becoming a supporter.
• Karen mentioned her blog post about the supporter program. (00:08:30)
• Bradley mentioned his blog post about the supporter program as well. (00:09:30)

Segment 1 (00:16:16)

• Bradley and Karen pick up on a topic original discussed in Segment 1 of FaiF 0x02. (00:16:50)
• Bradley discussed the Laurie Stearns' article from the California Law Review, entitled Copy Wrong: Plagiarism, Process, Property, and the Law (00:23:50)
• Bradley mentioned The GNOME Foundation Copyright Assignment Guidelines that he co-authored. (00:28:05)
• Bradley mentioned the Doris Kearns Goodwin Plagiarism controversy, and how it would have been simply redressed if the material she reused had been copylefted. (00:29:26)
• Karen mentioned that Flickr made different policies for CC-BY-SA'd works when selling printed versions. (32:30)
• Bradley mentioned that even software freedom advocates just comply with the copyleft licenses and don't work collaboratively, particularly during hostile forks, using Conservancy's Kallithea project as an example. (00:35:25)
• Bradley reiterated a point he made in FaiF 0x08, where he discussed that Linus Torvalds switched to GPL for Linux because he realized non-commercial restrictions weren't appropriate. (00:37:50)
• Bradley mentioned the hostile fork of GCC called egcs. The H-Online years later wrote a long article that discussed the egcs fork egcs fork. (00:39:46)
• Bradley mentioned that plagiarism is ultimately about attribution, and modern DVCS systems makes attribution easy and renders plagiarism impossible (if DVCS logs are accurate). (00:44:15)
• Bradley mentioned that he continually has learned the lesson that if you let your employer keep copyright, you lose everything you had when you switch employers (if the work isn't copylefted). (00:47:00)
• Bradley discussed the methods of attribution required in GPLv3. (00:50:05)
• Bradley mentioned that copyright notices are the primary method of attribution in copyleft licenses, and even non-copyleft ones too. (00:53:19)
• Karen discussed the attribution requirements in text of CC-BY-SA 4.0. (00:53:49)
• Bradley wants to do a whole FaiF show about how CC-BY-SA may not be a true copyleft since it has no source code requirement (00:54:40)
• Bradley mentioned the “fake name” that film directors use when they wish to disavow a work they aren't happy with. The name is, in fact, Alan Smithee, and indeed the 1984 film Dune lists Smithee as a director even though David Lynch is known publicly to be the director. (00:58:40)
• Bradley mentioned the unfair accusations against Red Hat when they stopped publishing their internal Linux Git repository and instead released a more standard ChangeLog. (01:05:30)

Tags: faif, GPL, Creative Commons, commercial, licensing, plagiarism

June 13, 2013

0x3E: Mozilla - Licensing in the Trenches

Summary

Karen and Bradley listen to and discuss Gervase Markham's talk from FOSDEM 2013, entitled Mozilla: Licensing In The Trenches.

This show was released on Thursday 13 June 2013; its running time is 01:11:55.

Show Notes

Segment 0 (00:00:34)

• Bradley encouraged listeners to Conservancy's campaign for non-profit accounting software.
(02:10)
• Bradley mentioned his 2009 blog post encouraging people to donate to Free Software charities (02:50)
• Karen asked people to donate to the GNOME Foundation privacy campaign (04:11)

Segment 1 (00:04:57)

Gerv's slides from his FOSDEM 2013 talk can be downloaded from FOSDEM's website.

Segment 2 (00:51:48)

Bradley and Karen discuss Gerv's talk.

Tags: Creative Commons, licensing, non-profit, copyright, IBM, conferences, FOSDEM

July 17, 2012

Episode 0x2E: FOSDEM 2012: Linksvayer on Public Policy & CC 4.0

Summary

Karen and Bradley play and discuss Mike Linksvayer's FOSDEM 2012 talk, Creative Commons 4.0 licenses and other opportunities for FLOSS/free culture legal/policy intersections from the FOSDEM 2012 Legal and Policy Issues DevRoom.

This show was released on Tuesday 17 July 2012; its running time is 00:59:30.

Show Notes

Segment 0 (00:38)

Bradley and Karen suggest that you use the slides below when listening to Mike's talk.

Segment 1 (05:51)

Mike Linksvayer's slides for this talk are available in PDF format and in ODP format.

Segment 2 (33:43)

Segment 3 (34:25)

A special licensing message from Mike Linksvayer.

Segment 4 (35:09)

• Karen mentioned Bradley's favorite movie, It's a Wonderful Life.
• Bradley mentioned Asheesh Laroia, who appears to never blogged about his CC/credit-card-thief freenode confusion story. (48:00)
• Bradley mentioned Fontana's Copyleft.next project . (50:00)
• Bradley mentioned the ST:TNG episode, Unification, Part II, although he kept calling it Reunification during the episode. Please don't write in to complain; he realized the error after recording. (54:39)

Tags: faif, Creative Commons, FOSDEM

February 1, 2011

Episode 0x08: Strictly Commercial

Summary

Bradley and Karen discuss non-commercial-only commons licenses, particularly the CC-By-NC license, and how they compare to Free Culture and Free Software licenses, and why some authors pick NC licenses instead of Free Culture/Software ones.

This show was released on Tuesday 1 February 2011; its running time is 00:49:32.

Show Notes

Segment 0 (00:36)

• Listeners seeking a show on how to select a Free Software license, differences between copyleft and non-copyleft, and how they interact with copyright are encouraged to listen to episode 0x08 of the old Software Freedom Law Show which covered these topics. Please write in again if that show doesn't cover your questions on the issue. (02:10)
• Bradley reminisced about the crass “Brian and O'Brien” show on Baltimore's B-104 Gary Huddles who was notorious locally in Baltimore because he was implicated in Maryland's version of the 1980s Savings and Loan scandals. (03:30)
• Karen mentioned that freedomdefined.org is the source for the Free Culture definition that defines what licenses are Free Culture licenses. (12:54)
• Bradley suggested listening to some of the old versions of RMS' Copyright vs. Community in the Age of Computer Networks. In fact, there is an audio recording of the one at MIT on 19 April 2001 that Bradley attended, and an audio recording of the one that Bradley heard at Cardozo Law School. There is audio of the Q&A session, wherein RMS engages in that discussion Bradley mentioned with Free Culture activists. (10:10, 14:04)
• Bradley mentioned that Linus Torvalds switched to GPL for Linux because he realized non-commercial restrictions weren't appropriate. (Search the string GPL on that link to find Linus' answer on that.) (19:00)
• Karen mentioned that Creative Commons did a study considering what people understand commercial vs. non-commercial to mean. (20:43)
• Karen and Bradley discussed the text of CC-By-NC. (23:00)
• Karen mentioned various CC-By-SA licensed derivatives that had been made from Sita Sings the Blues. (38:24)
• Bradley discussed the Harry Potter Lexicon case and Karen mentioned the so-called IP Colloquium discussion on it. (44:30)
• Bradley mentioned Memory Alpha, which is a CC-By-NC wiki regarding Star Trek, which is tolerated by Paramount. (45:20)

Tags: faif, Creative Commons, commercial, licensing