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