Licensing Policies

Colleges and universities routinely struggle to address their copyright licensing needs campus-wide. How do faculty, library, bookstore staff, and others on campus effectively assess and secure the rights to copy material for coursepacks, classroom handouts, reserves, course Web pages, e-mail, and more? Are instructors getting permission to post published content on course management systems and electronic reserves when fair use may not apply?

Microsoft Canada accidently released the price of Windows Vista: US $449 for the full version.

Of course, that's just the licencing cost for the software and doesn't include the eye-watering cost of new hardware that meets the mininum specification to run full Vista.

Thanks to the register.

newsforge.com is reportingthat a pair of companies are in displute over their use of the opensource ArtisticLicence, widely used in the Perl world. It's a clear case ofwhoever drafted the contract for work between the two companies notunderstanding the licence being used.

This does not appear to be a challenge to the licence itself.

ibiblio, the famous Internet library and archive, recently launched a project to distribute content via bittorrent, a protocol which is very efficient at distributing large files over the Internet. Unfortunately, ibiblio missed an opportunity to set themselves apart from the many who use bittorrent to distribute content of dubious legality, by completely failing to include any kind of licensing information.

A random example is their speaker series, containing a raft of people I know to be both excellent speakers and supporters good licensing practise. Their presentations are being distributed with "License(s): None", which presumably translates into "we believe we have a (perhaps implicit) licence to distribute this content, but no record to hand of what that license might be."

Don't get me wrong, there is no doubt in my mind that ibiblio have a licence to distribute this content, it is just a shame to see them not taking this sterling opportunity to take the high moral and legal ground on this.

In this recently published article, Rowan Wilson discusses why we (OSS Watch) recently switched to releasing all of our content under a Creative Commons licence.

Like many organisations in the educational arena, generating content (reports, guides, manuals, etc) is a key aspect of our work and many of these are for wide distribution. Why hamper their distribution and reuse with a baroque licence (or indeed no licence at all), when there are clear, easily understood licences available to be used?

The report

The Debian project has as it's core the Debian Free Software Guidelines (DFSG), which define the licences which software distributed in Debian could use. It has long been understood but unenforced that the DFSG should apply to documentation and content as well as software. With the recent release of the stable "sarge" distribution the Debian developers are laying the foundations of the next release by (among other things) enforcing this rule.

So why is debian throwing out all content licensed under the widely-known and well regarded Creative Commons and GNU Free Documentation License licences? They have a statement of what they collectively believe in, and a close analysis shows that these licences aren't up to scratch.

In the medium to long term this is likely to re-enforce the position debian already has as the high-moral-ground software distributor to the open source world but seriously undermine their ability to distribute content, which arguably isn't something they should be doing anyway.