Seeking for legal advice (fedora-zh.org)

[Paul W. Frields]

On Thu, Nov 06, 2008 at 09:04:44AM +0800, Yuan Yijun wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> We some ambassadors are setting up another website for fedora (will be
> http://{bbs,wiki,news}.fedora-zh.org ). Current copyright and licese
> rules:
> 
> * any contents belong to its author
> * on bbs any original contents must be licensed under OPL + CC(by-sa)
> * on news any original contents must be licensed under CC(by-sa)
> * on wiki all contents are in public domain
> 
> What I want to know is:
> 
> * should we ask the authors to assign copyright ownership to our
> organization? but we do not have an organization yet, and we don't
> have the effort of setting up a CLA (!) system.

I would *highly* discourage you from duplicating the work already done
in the Fedora Project on a CLA system or other infrastructure.  This
completely defeats the point of scalability.  Instead, I would
encourage you to work with the Infrastructure team as needed to make
any systems you decide to set up use the Fedora Account System,
possibly OpenID for example.

Having local communities in Fedora is a very good thing -- splitting
those local communities off into separate systems is not.

> * the reason to use OPL is that I hope some content can be transfered
> to fedoraproject wiki without asking for more permission. Is it
> possible if we do not own those contents?

If the content is OPL without additional restrictions, yes, it can be
transferred to the Fedora Project wiki without permission.  That is a
redistribution that is allowed under the license.  You would want to
make sure the new copy included information about who wrote it, to
satisfy the OPL.

> * the reason to use CC(by-sa) is that the license is so popular. It
> seems fedoraproject suggests some contents to be CC-ed (artwork,
> videos) except for documents, why?

The OPL license was chosen because at the time CC was very new and
untested, and the OPL was the most liberal and comprehensible license
we could find to satisfy our needs.

> * is there any conflict in our requirement that contents are licensed
> in both OPL and CC(by-sa)?

This is probably a question for the fedora-legal-list.

> * any other problems do you think?

Your domain name, if you want to use the term "Fedora" as part of it,
must be explicitly licensed by permission.  "FEDORA" is a trademark of
Red Hat, Inc.  Use of the logo on your site is slightly less
problematic.  The new trademark guidelines, which have been approved
and should be in the official position on our site shortly, are here:

https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/User:Pfrields/New_trademark_guidelines

-- 
Paul W. Frields                                http://paul.frields.org/
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