[Scheme-reports] Agreement to license

[m***@gmail.com]

Where are the agreements to license the copyright of the Scheme reports located?

[Aaron W. Hsu]

Post by m***@gmail.com
Where are the agreements to license the copyright of the Scheme reports located?

I am not sure what you mean by agreements to license the copyright.
Copyright is not normally a thing that you license. The permissions
granted for copying and distribution/modification can be found in the
Background section of R7RS, though.

--
Aaron W. Hsu | ***@sacrideo.us | http://www.sacrideo.us
Please support my work: https://www.gittip.com/arcfide/

לֵրב חֲכ֞מ֎ים֙ ב֌ְבֵ֣ית אֵ֔בֶל וְלֵ֥ב כ֌ְס֎יל֎֖ים ב֌ְבֵ֥ית שׂ֎מְח֞֜ה׃

[m***@gmail.com]

John Cowan claimed that all contributors have agreed to license the reports for unrestricted use and modification. Where is the proof? (Email threads for example)

Post by Aaron W. Hsu

Post by m***@gmail.com
Where are the agreements to license the copyright of the Scheme reports located?

I am not sure what you mean by agreements to license the copyright.
Copyright is not normally a thing that you license. The permissions
granted for copying and distribution/modification can be found in the
Background section of R7RS, though.
--
Please support my work: https://www.gittip.com/arcfide/
לֵ֤ב חֲכָמִים֙ בְּבֵ֣ית אֵ֔בֶל וְלֵ֥ב כְּסִילִ֖ים בְּבֵ֥ית שִׂמְחָֽה׃
_______________________________________________
Scheme-reports mailing list
http://lists.scheme-reports.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/scheme-reports

[Alaric Snell-Pym]

Post by m***@gmail.com
John Cowan claimed that all contributors have agreed to license the
reports for unrestricted use and modification. Where is the proof?
(Email threads for example)

I'm intrigued: Why do you care?

But, as it happens, I see the fact that everyone contributed to a
document that says "We intend this report to belong to the entire Scheme
community, and so we grant permission to copy it in whole or in part
without fee", at no point complained that we had not realised anything
we contributed would end up therein when it was submitted for public
review, voted to accept it, etc, as counting as agreement to license the
reports for unrestricted use and modification.

If you are, or work for, a legal entity that wants stronger assurance of
license than that, then you're welcome to not unrestrictedly use and
modify it; feel free to use your basic legal rights to read the thing
and use the concepts therein without copying the text, if you're worried
one of the contributors will suddenly leap up and sue you for copyright
infringement :-)

If you need specific legal ass-covering for something you really really
want to do, then you can also try and email all the listed contributors
asking them for their own approval for your specific (or general) use
case; but we never felt it worth doing so ourselves.

ABS

[Aaron W. Hsu]

Post by Alaric Snell-Pym
But, as it happens, I see the fact that everyone contributed to a
document that says "We intend this report to belong to the entire Scheme
community, and so we grant permission to copy it in whole or in part
without fee", at no point complained that we had not realised anything
we contributed would end up therein when it was submitted for public
review, voted to accept it, etc, as counting as agreement to license the
reports for unrestricted use and modification.

I'm also wondering about this term "unrestricted use" and previous
comments about public domain. The terms of the permission I think would
make it abundantly safe to take the document, or any smaller portion of
it, modify or change it, and then distribute it, with appropriate
copyright notifications concerning the source of the text. Indeed, this
is how it was done for R7RS.

What seems more suspicious, though I don't think legally problematic
from the above wide permission, is to copy the document, and then claim
copyright over it, and somehow incorporate it as a part of a significant
commercial endeavor, without citing or referencing the original work and
trying to pass the copy as your own work.

Thus, I'm quite curious why the OP is using the particular language of
"public domain" and "unrestricted" here in seeming opposition to what
already exists in the document. Some clarification would help. :-)

[John Boyle]

Searching for the OP's email address with Google, it looks like he has
asked about the copyright licensing terms for the language specs of: R7RS,
Erlang, Perl 6, PHP, Clojure, Dart, Tcl, and possibly more. In a Dart
thread, when asked to explain his concern, he said:

"My concern is that ECMA may prevent you from distributing modified versions
of the specification."

Assuming good faith, my best guess is that he's making a library of
language specs with his personal annotations and intending to publish it
eventually, or something of that nature.

--John Boyle
*Science is what we understand well enough to explain to a computer. Art is
everything else we do.* --Knuth

Post by Aaron W. Hsu

Post by Alaric Snell-Pym
But, as it happens, I see the fact that everyone contributed to a
document that says "We intend this report to belong to the entire Scheme
community, and so we grant permission to copy it in whole or in part
without fee", at no point complained that we had not realised anything
we contributed would end up therein when it was submitted for public
review, voted to accept it, etc, as counting as agreement to license the
reports for unrestricted use and modification.

I'm also wondering about this term "unrestricted use" and previous
comments about public domain. The terms of the permission I think would
make it abundantly safe to take the document, or any smaller portion of
it, modify or change it, and then distribute it, with appropriate
copyright notifications concerning the source of the text. Indeed, this
is how it was done for R7RS.
What seems more suspicious, though I don't think legally problematic
from the above wide permission, is to copy the document, and then claim
copyright over it, and somehow incorporate it as a part of a significant
commercial endeavor, without citing or referencing the original work and
trying to pass the copy as your own work.
Thus, I'm quite curious why the OP is using the particular language of
"public domain" and "unrestricted" here in seeming opposition to what
already exists in the document. Some clarification would help. :-)
--
Please support my work: https://www.gittip.com/arcfide/
לֵրב חֲכ֞מ֎ים֙ ב֌ְבֵ֣ית אֵ֔בֶל וְלֵ֥ב כ֌ְס֎יל֎֖ים ב֌ְבֵ֥ית שׂ֎מְח֞֜ה׃
_______________________________________________
Scheme-reports mailing list
http://lists.scheme-reports.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/scheme-reports

[John Cowan]

Post by Aaron W. Hsu
What seems more suspicious, though I don't think legally problematic
from the above wide permission, is to copy the document, and then claim
copyright over it, and somehow incorporate it as a part of a significant
commercial endeavor, without citing or referencing the original work and
trying to pass the copy as your own work.

Except for the last point, this is definitely legally unproblematic,
given the license. Explicitly *claiming* that you wrote every word of it,
and trying to prevent other people from doing so, would of course be Evil
and Wrong, not to mention illegal. But a mere failure to acknowledge
the source, while certainly tacky, is legally permissible.

Post by Aaron W. Hsu
Thus, I'm quite curious why the OP is using the particular language of
"public domain" and "unrestricted" here in seeming opposition to what
already exists in the document. Some clarification would help. :-)

In particular, dedications to the public domain are legally problematic
except in the Ninth Circuit (Alaska, Arizona, California, Hawaii, Idaho,
Montana, Nevada, Oregon, Washington, Guam, the Northern Marianas Islands).
Elsewhere in the U.S., not to mention the rest of the world, it isn't
clear that you can put something in the public domain just by saying
"I have abandoned the copyright" or indeed by any other means other than
the passage of time.

As such, then, licenses are much safer legally than public-domain
dedications. The best known of these, the Creative Commons CC0, provides
a highly permissive license as a backup just in case the dedication is
legally ineffective.

I am not a lawyer; this is not legal advice. But it is not the
unauthorized practice of law, either.

[Bear]

Post by Aaron W. Hsu
What seems more suspicious, though I don't think legally problematic
from the above wide permission, is to copy the document, and then claim
copyright over it, and somehow incorporate it as a part of a significant
commercial endeavor, without citing or referencing the original work and
trying to pass the copy as your own work.

If someone presented a modified document which still claimed to
be the standard for Scheme while actually saying different things
about the semantics of the language described, that would clearly
be a violation of the license under which the original is offered,
because the original is intended for the use of the Scheme community
and such a document would actively undermine the Scheme community.

Therefore, there IS in fact a license, so it is definitely not
"Public Domain." We are being asked to clarify the license so
that no knowledge of common sense is required to understand what
the license entails.

It's a request that probably makes sense in Lawyerese, and its
intent is probably to get a copy of the license actually translated
into Lawyerese. Unfortunately I know of no reliable way of
translating common sense into that language.

I have in the past advised someone (I'm forgetting whom right now)
that it was entirely okay to use R4RS (which was current at the time)
as the framework or "first draft" of a reference manual for his
particular scheme implementation - modifying the text as necessary
to describe the implemented language in the instance, as opposed to
the standard for the language family -- and, of course, clearly
indicating exactly what instance of the language was being described
as opposed to making the claim to be the standard itself.

I recall advising him that it would be a "Richard" at best to do so
without acknowledging the original document, but I think I agreed
with him at the time that there was no legal requirement to do so.

I believe that's probably still true of the current RNRS too, for
what it's worth.

Ray Dillinger

[John Cowan]

Post by Bear
If someone presented a modified document which still claimed to
be the standard for Scheme while actually saying different things
about the semantics of the language described, that would clearly
be a violation of the license under which the original is offered,
because the original is intended for the use of the Scheme community
and such a document would actively undermine the Scheme community.

I don't agree. Since "the entire Scheme community" is not a body
corporate, what is meant is that the document is for the use of the
members of the community. After all, in the view of some, R7RS-small
does exactly what you describe.

[Jonathan Rees]

Post by Aaron W. Hsu

Post by m***@gmail.com
Where are the agreements to license the copyright of the Scheme reports located?

I am not sure what you mean by agreements to license the copyright.
Copyright is not normally a thing that you license.

Copyright is often not licensed, but it is very normal for it to be, e.g. CC-BY, GPL, and all that.
A fishing license grants you a right to fish, without which you can't legally fish.
A drivers license grants you a right to drive, without which you can't legally drive.
A copyright license grants you a right to copy (perform, translate, etc.), without which you can't legally copy (with a few well known exceptions for expired term, fair use, etc.).

"Agreement to license" is redundant. The question ought to be, what documentary evidence do we have that the grant occurred?

Jonathan

Post by Aaron W. Hsu
The permissions
granted for copying and distribution/modification can be found in the
Background section of R7RS, though.
--
Please support my work: https://www.gittip.com/arcfide/
לֵ֤ב חֲכָמִים֙ בְּבֵ֣ית אֵ֔בֶל וְלֵ֥ב כְּסִילִ֖ים בְּבֵ֥ית שִׂמְחָֽה׃
_______________________________________________
Scheme-reports mailing list
http://lists.scheme-reports.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/scheme-reports

[Jonathan Rees]

Post by m***@gmail.com
Where are the agreements to license the copyright of the Scheme reports located?

The agreements were probably made starting in the early 1980s. There was certainly at least one conversation in which the behavior of participants would have legally constituted a copyright license. The agreements could have been made verbally or even nonverbally, without documentary evidence; that doesn't mean they weren't agreements. The lack of such evidence could in theory be exploited by an unscrupulous rightsholder. To prevail in court they would need to demonstrate that (a) they are a rightsholder and (b) the copying or performance was infringing on their copyright i.e. not licensed by them. Both (a) and (b) are long shots, (a) because we have poor records of authorship until recently and (b) because they'd have to explain why they contributed to a document that clearly says that its authors license copyright. In a civil suit I think they would also have to show personal harm. Consider the likelihood of the conjunction of all this relative to, say, being hit by a meteor.

The situation is how it is; there's nothing anyone can do about it. Why not give it a rest? If you want to talk about a different document, that's a different matter, and you can take up the matter with its authors. Or you can write your own document and do as you like.

Jonathan

Post by m***@gmail.com
_______________________________________________
Scheme-reports mailing list
http://lists.scheme-reports.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/scheme-reports