[pydotorg-www] [PSF-Board] Nonprofit Academic Permission Request ::wpmc::10-17250

[David Mertz]

A Collection Copyright cannot authorize copying on component material that does not itself have permission for copying.  So indeed, the PSF may be able to assert additional copyright interest in the Wiki as an aggregation, but even if we did so it would not thereby give us control to authorize use of any page within it; we could only *prohibit* copying of the collection as a whole (i.e. even if someone had permission for each component page).

Copyright law is really messed up, and it's always about having fewer rights, never about gaining more. Among other flaws, this often creates "orphan works" with no identifiable owner, which are thereby impossible to use by *anyone*. :-( 

That said, I really do think the slightly wink-and-nudge approach is the thing to do.  As Carl Karsten phrases it in a different thread: "the PSF does not have an opinion, use your good judgment and hope for the best." 

On Apr 20, 2012, at 10:18 AM, Guido van Rossum wrote:

> On Fri, Apr 20, 2012 at 9:36 AM, "Martin v. Löwis" <martin at v.loewis.de> wrote:
>>> I'd like to propose an action item to look into making the Wiki
>>> contents copyrighted by the PSF or implicitly licensed to the PSF as
>>> well, so in the future we can give a full license to the entire site.
>>> The request today shows the value of such a license. I also wonder if
>>> there isn't a way we can consider the wiki contents *as a whole* as a
>>> collection, which appears to be separately copyrightable (IIRC
>>> there've been suits about collections of materials where the
>>> comprising pieces were not copyrightable -- but IANAL and I don't know
>>> if this is possible).
>> 
>> I think this really is lawyer's land.
>> 
>> In the future, we may hint potential copiers that it may be easier to
>> ask for forgiveness than for permission. I doubt any contributor would
>> go after somebody making a mirror or an offline copy. But as for giving
>> permission: here I really hesitate without a lawyer telling me that I
>> can give such permission.
> 
> Agreed. But getting a lawyer to explain the situation to us is still a
> "project". (And one that I am not personally going to take on. I hit
> my lawyer quota in 2001.)
> 
> -- 
> --Guido van Rossum (python.org/~guido)
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