Adayapalam Appaiah Kumaraswamy wrote:
> Also, the BSD fortune packages would be a welcome addition.
Red Hat deliberately dropped this, citing legal concerns.
I can see their point. Quoting a few lines from a book is (sweeping
generalisation here) normally considered fair use, and acceptable.
Quoting an entire work, or something which could reasonably be
considered to be an entire work, is copyright infringement. Quoting a
large part of a work is also illegal.
Some of the "fortunes" in the BSD package are either poems or the lyrics
to songs. Where these are under copyright, they should not be in the
BSD fortune file.
Then, of course, Red Hat's distributions are sold under lots of
different legal systems, with different theories about what is legal.[1]
And the fortune file's attributions were not always accurate (or their
quoting, either), making it non-trivial to check who really wrote that
quote, and whether it was really OK to use.
And getting it wrong could mean that the *whole* distribution could be
barred from being distributed until the offending quote was excised,
new media burnt, new packages produced, the old recalled...
Red Hat didn't need the cost or the hassle for a marginal package.
As always, I Am Not A Lawyer...
James.
[1] For example, you'd think a translation produced in 1611 would be out
of copyright, wouldn't you? But under English law, the King James
Version of the Bible is Crown copyright in perpetuity, despite having
been written in 1611. A suitably long quote from the Song of Songs could
theoretically attract the attention of the Crown's patentee: the
Cambridge University Press, I believe.
US Constitutional scholars: that's why the "for limited times" clause
is there.
--
E-mail address: james@ | "Reliability went through the floor, tunnelled its
westexe.demon.co.uk | way to the centre of the Earth, and perished in the
| magma."
| -- Saundo
