Article Summary Per Author?

carl_galloway · Post by **carl_galloway** » Mon Oct 15, 2007 3:23 pm

Please don't misunderstand, I don't agree with copyright infringement, but seriously, with a product like Serendipity and templates that are made available for free there is no way to enforce copyright, and as Brian says, there is a big difference between advertisement and respecting copyright.

The bulletproof designers need to understand that their rather large icon in the footer would be considered advertising and I would not be surprised if a significant percentage of users remove it. Sorry, these things need common sense. Most of my templates have a copyright notice within an HTML comment inside index.tpl, most users leave this where it is but some remove the footer link, which is their right to do.

That's my two cents.

Post by **garvinhicking** » Mon Oct 15, 2007 3:26 pm

Hi!

That said, one must make the distinction between copyright notice and advertising. Bulletproof, for instance, was/is not distributed with copyright notice or license. It was distributed as a part of Serendipity. As such, compliance is to keep copyright notice within the code.

Bulletproof contains this note:

Code: Select all

            <!-- ************************************************************** -->
            <!-- The image and link below must remain if you use this template  -->
            <!-- or create your own template based on the bulletproof framework -->
            <!-- ************************************************************** -->

That's a notice, and it indicates, that what comes below is the copyright information of that template.

This means you are not allowed to remove what stands below, becuase it would be a removal of copyright notice, which is forbidden by the BSD licensing.

You are also not allowed, for example, to rename "serendipity" into "My Cool Blog" and changing the output of the SErendipity banner in the backend, or the powered-by notice in the Backend.

You ARE free to create your own s9y template that contains no HTML MEDA-Information about Serendipity, this is fully in accordance with the BSD licensing. But using an existing template and removing the link is a copyright infringement.

Bottom line: If something is distributed with Serendipity, it does not mean you are allowed to remove any copyrights. BSD licensing only allows you to USE something commercially and even selling it, but only by leaving the original copyright information and ownership intact.

Best regards,
Garvin

bdconnolly · Post by **bdconnolly** » Mon Oct 15, 2007 3:44 pm

No. With all due respect Garvin, the advertising is not a copyright notice. It is a condition of use that may not be legal under the umbrella of Serendipity. Bottom line: Bulletproof is not a stand alone piece. Furthermore, it was also distributed as a part of Serendipity and as such one must only be in compliance with Serendipity.

Post by **garvinhicking** » Mon Oct 15, 2007 4:19 pm

Hi!

bdconnolly wrote:No. With all due respect Garvin, the advertising is not a copyright notice. It is a condition of use that may not be legal under the umbrella of Serendipity. Bottom line: Bulletproof is not a stand alone piece. Furthermore, it was also distributed as a part of Serendipity and as such one must only be in compliance with Serendipity.

You should not use it, if you do not agree to those terms. It is in compliance with serendipity, because it has its own copyright like the rest of Serendipity.

You have a fundamental misunderstanding of the BSD license, I'm afraid to say that. Please re-read about it on http://www.fsf.org/.

Under no circumstances are you allowed to remove copyright notices about creators of any part of Serendipity, no matter if its a template or some output in the media gallery of s9y.

Regards,
Garvin

bdconnolly · Post by **bdconnolly** » Mon Oct 15, 2007 4:27 pm

I have not removed ANY copyright notice. Period.

We are NOT discussing copyright notice; we are discussing the legitimacy of advertising as a non-express condition of use under the umbrella of Serendipity.

"Powered by" is NOT a copyright notice.

Post by **Don Chambers** » Mon Oct 15, 2007 5:36 pm

Brian - let's forget about the legal implications for a moment. The efforts of serendipity developers, designers and the user community are voluntary and without compensation. All that is occasionally asked for in return is the courtesy of giving credit where it is due. That is a relatively small price to pay, don't you think?

I asked you repeatedly WHY you would want to remove it so the bp developers could consider your logic in our position regarding these links in the future. You refused to answer the question despite my repeated requests, standing firmly in your position that it was within your rights to do so.

As Garvin has already clearly explained, it is NOT within your right to do so. Your actions ARE, however, a tremendous slap in the face to the bulletproof development team, serendipity developers and every other designer/developer/user of this great open source project. Defend your position all you want - all you are doing is alienating yourself from the very community from which you seek assistance.

Just as you believe it is YOUR choice whether or not to preserve acknowledgement for those who spent thousands of hours to provide you with your website, it is also OUR choice whether or not to assist you with your problems. How you respond to this matter could have a substantial impact on the number of people willing to respond to your posts.

If you have a compelling reason NOT to want those links on your site, why don't you just propose an alternate method of recognition/compensation acceptable to the bp development team? In other words, instead of constantly taking from this community, have you ever thought of giving something back?

bdconnolly · Post by **bdconnolly** » Mon Oct 15, 2007 6:08 pm

1. Don, I sent you my contact info and asked you to call me. You refused.

2. As to Garvin, with ALL due respect and then some, he is NOT correct as to the requirements by law. Period.

3. I take GREAT exception to your characterization that I'm slapping the development team in the face. NOT TRUE! I am and have been an EXTREMELY loyal fan of Serendipity and have worked hard to improve the project and get the good word out.

4. Please don't sink to threatening me. And please don't assume that you Don are the project. Others, like Carl here, totally understand the distinction that's been made. We TOTALLY respect copyrights. If you want an advertisement or otherwise compensation, there are ways to do that expressly and properly. I recommend that you remove Bulletproof from the Serendipity distribution. Put a license clearly on your site. Add a Paypal button.

chickens · Post by **chickens** » Mon Oct 15, 2007 8:26 pm

In my opinion forcing people to display a link to an open source project is just not a smart move. I am in no way an expert on open source licenses, but I thought the BSD license made is so you have to keep the copyright notice intact in the source files. I did not think it forced people to display an advertisement to a product.

That being said, I personally have no problem giving credit to both s9y and bulletproof on my site. I did remove the image because the image just looked horrible on my site. I left a link to both products as I want people to find s9y. I just do not think it is a smart move to force people to do this.

On a slightly side note; I just downloaded bulletproof from s9y-bulletproof.com and I do not see a license in there. I do not see a README, LICENSE, ABOUT or anything else stating the license of the files. Furthermore the only thing I see about the license is some reference in the footer stating you have to keep it there. If you really would like to be strict about the license then I would suggest adding it to the external download.

carl_galloway · Post by **carl_galloway** » Tue Oct 16, 2007 8:21 am

The 'license' included within the Serendipity' download package is nothing more or less than a statement that the copyright notice

Copyright (c) 2003-2005, Jannis Hermanns (on behalf the Serendipity Developer Team)
All rights reserved.

must remain in that file (ie /docs/license), and that this file must be passed with any distribution of Serendipity.

From a legal perspective (putting aside ethical issues for the moment) this effectively means that Serendipity is unlicensed. All discussions about a BSD style license are well and good, but the fact is that the current download contains no license. Unfortunately, this has repercussions.

First, it means that in fact bdconnolly is entirely correct, and it means that chickens is correct. Any code, plugin or template that is distributed with Serendipity is therefore distributed without license. Given that the Bulletproof team actively campaigned for their tamplate to be included, they must accept that the current version of the bulletproof template is therefore unlicensed.

Second, it means that the Serendipity copyright holder, and the primary package maintainer, could be held personally responsible for redistributing
GNU code without properly defining its license to people who download Serendipity. For example smarty, pear, the wysiwyg editor and other bits and pieces, are included within the Serendipity installation without proper explanation of their licensing, but luckily the open source community aren't likely to sue anyone.

Third, the current Serendipity license effectively means that anyone could take Serendipity, rename it, repackage it with a new license, and redistribute it and all they have to do is leave the existing license in the docs folder. They do NOT need to leave the comments within the code, and they do not need to allow Serendipity to create meta tags with 'powered by' statements.

My recommendation after bdconnolly's assertion, is that a full license (GNU or BSD) needs to be included within the Serendipity package and it must explicitly mention that some included code/templates may have other restrictions and that they are included solely for users to get the most benefit from Serendipity.

That the license applicable to Serendipity be mentioned on the download page of s9y.org before a user downloads any version of Serendipity.

That Spartacus is immediately upgraded to display the license conditions of any plugin or template within its description so that the user sees this before they click the install button.

@Don, ethically you are correct, legally you are wrong. This means that the bulletproof team need to look at the wider implications of licensing their template. Currently, this means that any version of the bulletproof template that was included within Serendipity effectively lost its license. You could argue that it didn't, but if you do so, then your only cause of action is against the Serendipity copyright holder, or the package maintainer. If you wish to protect your copyright, you can require that Serendipity remove the template from the package, but you cannot enforce your copyright against bdconnolly. He downloaded Serendipity in good faith, and there is documentary evidence in these forums that the bulletproof team actively campaigned to have bulletproof included within the package.

On a personal note, I've worked happily with Brian Connolly in the past and have no doubt will continue to do so in the future. I believe that he is an active supporter of Serendipity, and in my opinion his integrity remains untarnished.

Post by **garvinhicking** » Tue Oct 16, 2007 9:48 am

Hi Carl!

carl_galloway wrote:The 'license' included within the Serendipity' download package is nothing more or less than a statement that the copyright notice

That's not true. It contains the full BSD license, quoted here:

http://www.opensource.org/licenses/bsd-license.php

However, I've added a statement now talking about other copyright notices there. We don't bundle GPL code with s9y. Smarty, PEAR and the wysiwyg editor is compatible with our BSD license.

My opinion is this: If someone dislikes the "advertisement" (I still call it copyright) of bulletproof, he has the full freedom to NOT use the bulletproof template but create his own. Not paying credit for something others did is in my opinion simply not nice thing to do. It's fine to use the s9y core for commercial reasons, but then at least take the effort to build your own template if you want to remove copyright notes from the template authors.

Regards,
Garvin

carl_galloway · Post by **carl_galloway** » Tue Oct 16, 2007 10:21 am

Garvin,

Calling something a copyright statement doesn't actually make it so. Typically a copyright statement must explicitly mention the word copyright, the date it takes effect from, and the terms of use, and it must be displayed to the user before they make the decision to buy or use the product. This is established law in every developed country including the USA, Germany and the UK. The bulletproof template does not do this, therefore the copyright statement hidden in the code is of NO EFFECT.

Also, the BSD style license you link to says NOTHING about users being required to keep links in place, the only requirement being that that notice is retained within the distribution. Basically, if bdconnolly has removed /docs/license then he is in breach of the license, but if he has not removed this, then he is fully and legally entitled to remove any and all links, remove powered by meta tags, and even substantially change the way Serendipity is displayed to obscure its origins. In fact he could even go so far as to claim it is a Wordpress blog and there is nothing in the license you choose to use that would prevent him from doing this.

Guys it's time to get real. The law is different from ethics, and wanting something to be different doesn't make it so. bdconnolly has followed the Serendipity license to the letter of the law. And he is correct in saying that that bulletproof is bundled under these conditions. If people are not happy with this, then they need to EXPLICITLY draw attention to the terms of use BEFORE a user installs a template. That means the template configuration screen needs to be updated to show that the license for the template is different from the Serendipity license. That also means that if bulletproof becomes the default template, then it WILL lose its GNU license because users will not be made aware of its different license before installation.

Post by **garvinhicking** » Tue Oct 16, 2007 10:26 am

Hi Carl!

I am not a lawyer. But the way our code is licensed is the way that virtually any open source software does its licensing - by stating it within the sourcecode. I have no motivation nor time to discuss about this basic implication.

I am here to develop sourcecode, not advise legal things. When I start to think that Serendipity is abused, I will simply stop developing it. I still trust in the implied ethics and about common sense about what is copyright and what not.

I still fail to see why keeping a notice "template by bulletproof-team" is such a hard thing to do. You could even hide it via CSS, that would be a valid thing to do (because the note is still intact in the HTML sourcecode!).

I will not reply further in this thread, it's not good for my blood pressure. I'm sad about the turn this thread has taken.

Regards,
Garvin.

carl_galloway · Post by **carl_galloway** » Tue Oct 16, 2007 10:32 am

Garvin, I understand your point of view, and without you the Serendipity platform would not exist. Unfortunately, open source software does not have the protection that it deserves, which is why the good will of people like you is so easily abused. It is possible to make things better, and prevent your blood pressure from rising.

Simply tell all plugin developers and template designers that if they want their code to be bundled with Serendipity or listed in Spartacus they must either agree to the BSD style license or explicitly provide a different license, and edit their info.txt file to mention the license. It is that simple. Don's outburst has at least raised the subject and allowed us to find solutions.

Post by **Don Chambers** » Wed Oct 17, 2007 12:27 am

This whole issue has become so dissapointing. The most recent posts are laced with incorrect information. For instance, in the 1989, the USA enacted the Berne Convention Implementation Act which does not require use of the term "Copyright". Specifically, the US copyright office states "

The use of a copyright notice is no longer required under U.S. law, although it is often beneficial. Because prior law did contain such a requirement, however, the use of notice is still relevant to the copyright status of older works.

It is still advantageous to use the term, and among other things prevents a "I didn't realize" defense, but that only has the potential of reducing damages, not changing the outcome of infringement. A list of the 163 countries, including the UK and Germany, which subscribe to the policies of the Berne Convention can be found here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_co ... Convention.

I think there is much confusion between the fact that s9y, its plugins, and templates are licensed works, and not "public domain". There also seems to be confusion about copyright vs. license. Copyright is, according to the US Copyright Office, "a form of protection provided by the laws of the United States to authors of “original works of authorship.” Nearly every country extends the same kind of definition. A license dictates the terms of use. An author holds copyright to the work, and dictates the terms of the use of that work via a license. S9y itself contains components that are copyrighted by people & organinzations other than the s9y developers. These components sometimes contain their own licenses. The wysiwyg editor is a good example, containing its own copyright notices, and its own license. Complying with the license terms of s9y, but violating the license of the wysiwyg license is still a violation, should it occur. You could not, for instance, remove the author name/copyright and license from the wysiwyg editor, then claim to be in compliance simply because you left s9y's copyright in tact.

There is also no requirement that I know of to present license terms to a user prior to useage, although most End User License Agreements (EULA) do so. There are well known, popularly used license formats - such as the Berkely variations (BSD) and GPL. However, anything identified as "terms of use" is, in fact, a license. Don't agree with the terms? Fine. Don't use it. Want an exception to the terms - try asking for the exception.... it just might be granted. Really value what you are using? Try a contribution and ask for the right to modify the terms of use as a result of that contribution.

Bulletproof is a copyrighted work, and contains terms of use, as Garvin has noted earlier. The only CURRENT terms of useage are the preservation of the author identification links. Bulletproof is also unique in another aspect - it ENCOURAGES people to develop their own templates. That is exactly what it was designed to do. But if someone uses it with little more than subtle css modifications, that does not become a uniquely different template. It is still bulletproof, still copyrighted by the authors, and still subject to the stated terms of use. S9y's license states that it's copyright message must remain in tact within it's source files. BP's license states that the author identification links must remain in tact where they are located, which is limited exclusively to index.tpl. Copyright law protects the author identification within the css files. Satisfying s9y's terms does NOT automatically satisfy bp's terms.

In my second post, I said "forget about the legal implications for a moment".... and while I did not use the term "ethics", that was my implication.

But enough about legal speculation. Prior to this post, I have only posted twice on this thread, yet Carl has described my position as an "outburst" and Brian has accused me of threatening him (not sure how that conclusion was reached).

I started by asking a simple question - why... WHY were the LINKS removed. Conclusions were immediately drawn suggesting I meant the bulletproof button. That is certainly ONE of the links. The others are the "powered by s9y" and "template by bulletproof devlopment team" links. I did not initially demand they be reinstated, I initially wanted to know WHY. I stated further that knowing WHY might help the bp developers form a better perspective on the inclusion of these links as this subject is one of several we have on our to-do list. That question has STILL not been answered. Once Brian became defensive and assertive about HIS rights, and Garvin explained that it was likely a license violation, I requested the links be reinstated until, and if, we changed our position regarding the links.... but I still wanted to know WHY they were removed, even telling him via PM that knowing this could well change our collective position on the inclusion of any or all of the links.

Then an attempt was made to spin this into an advertising issue. It is not about advertising. The team thought a button would be cool for people who create templates using the framework to show their support for the underlying framework and clearly indicate that their template was, in fact, based on bp since bp is quite different from any s9y template to date. If some want to call that advertising, they are in error. That button might have a graphic representation, but the generated content includes the original author imformation "based on the bulletproof template framework". The "template by" link identifies actual authorship of THIS template (not a derivative). That link clearly identifies the author of "an original work of authorship".

The BP team has already recognized the possibility that the button may not be for everyone. Chickens has already mentioned he removed the button. I have seen his site. Has any BP team member ever said anything to him about the removal? No... he stated WHY: it conflicted with the esthetics of his site, and he preserved the (slightly modified) "template by" link. Another person recently created their own bp-based colorset/tempalate, changing the colors of the button: http://blog.the-world-in-our-eyes.de/ Did the bp team say anything to him? No. He wanted something consistent with his colorset. Still another user removed all links from the footer, but created a static page called "credits" to recognize all involved in her site here: http://www.duchessjane.com/index.php?/p ... edits.html. Any objection from the bp team? No. She preserved the intent, and went above and beyond by truly demonstrating appreciation for those who make her site possible. Finally, I believe the other bp authors have been PAID to customize the bp template, sometimes removing the links in exchange for that payment.

What has happened in this particular instance? The user has removed every credit reference, never once even suggesting "hey great template, much appreciated, but I do not want the footer links BECAUSE OF ___________.... would you guys find [some proposal] acceptable if I remove or modify them". Instead, all we have heard is everything imaginable to assert WHY he has the RIGHT to remove all credit references. That is hardly something I would characterize the way Carl did as "his integrity remains untarnished". It is, at the very least, unethical, and at most, a copyright and license violation. In fact, I do not understand how you could say protection of these links is ethically correct, but this user's elimination of them perserves the users integrity. Can't have it both ways.

This issue was NOT solely for the benefit of BP - it was for all template designers - trying to increase awareness of, and appreciation for, the efforts of this particular open source community. I realize there will always be abusers, but ignoring the issue simple leads to more and more abusers. Raising awareness, regardless of the legal implications, might make more people realize that there is substantial effort involved and much more to be gained by supporting those efforts rather than disrespecting the efforts. There are certainly legal implications as well, and I am not trying to dismiss those. I certainly do not want to be in a position where, not only does someone remove all references to an author's efforts, but takes credit for the effort themselves.

This user has removed the original author identification and added his OWN copyright message, implying that HE is the author and/or owner of everything contained on that site, including the viewable template.

Carl - I find much of what you have been saying interesting to say the least. You too have defended your links/copyright: http://board.s9y.org/viewtopic.php?t=7602 saying this about the removal of links from one of YOUR templates:

carl_galloway wrote:If you do remove that you are effectively breaching my copyright, and this goes against the principles of open source software.

I probably have as much time into BP as many others have into an entire library of templates.... and I am only one of the contributors. There are 2 other primary authors, and dozens of others who helped make bp a reality. I did it because I enjoyed the effort. I did it to give something back to a community I respect and appreciate and, like any other designer, possibly make a few bucks from future templates I might develop, to serve as an incentive to spend more of my extremely limited personal time on such endeavors and offset the expense of hardware and service providers involved in the effort.

Carl has said "wanting something to be different doesn't make it so". This user WANTS to believe that there has been no copyright or license violation.... but, as Carl said, "wanting" doesn't make it so. I do, however, invite and encourage this user to exercise any of the available options to remedy this situation.

chickens · Post by **chickens** » Wed Oct 17, 2007 1:25 am

Ah yes, open source politics. Where everyone has no idea what they are talking about

I am going to take a read over at Growlaw, because I am truly stumped at this point.

I think we might need some professional help (in more ways than just the one

)