Legal Team/Minutes/2011-09-21

SPDX Legal Team Meeting Minutes - 21 Sept 2011

Esteban Rockett, Motorola
Jilayne Lovejoy, OpenLogic
Kim Wiens, OpenLogic
Terry Ilardi, IBM
Jordan Hatcher, ARM
Mark Gisi, Wind River
Adam Cohn, Cisco
Tom Incorvia, Microfocus
Kate Stewart, Canonical
Mansour Ghomeshi, Motorola
Michael Herzog, NexB

Linux.org still down; spdx emails also do not seem to be working…

(1) Discussion on "Modified MIT/CC-0/PDDL"; with populating Mark Gisi's spreadsheet and reminder from Karen on "why we initially avoided CC-0"

http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/

http://opendatacommons.org/licenses/pddl/1.0/

• Karen circulated a modified MIT license with comments as an option
• issues came up at Vancouver birds of a feather discussion re: hesitation about using a new/unfamiliar license (PddL)
• Mark Gisi maintaining a tracking document with pros and cons re: various license options so can see how we came to the final decision
• Why not CC-Zero?
• Karen had raised concern by merely using CC-Zero might indicate there is copyright protection in data or an endorsement/agreement with European data laws o maybe we can diffuse this concern with some introductory language? E.g. "to the extent there are any rights… (description of rights)…"
• will it imply that we believe data is copyrightable and that could create other repercussions?
• CC-Zero does cover European laws, no gap in coverage; maybe makes more sense to present a legal tool around this, instead of debating; if take position of someone who receives the database and don't give them a license (to avoid) then they may have to assume they have to get © clearence, so as practical matter, better to give license up front
• Preface license with statement that comments and anything else that may be copyrightable according to local law - CC-Zero (or whatever) applies
• i.e. "I'm not sure what's all in there, but whatever it is, I'm giving it to you under public domain" 
• o would CC-Zero appease the feedback at the Vancouver birds of a feather
• more brand recognition for CC, so people more familiar with products by them
• CC-Zero is shorter than PDDL is longer and not used as commonly, thus making CC-Zero more palatable even if PDDL does the same thing
• Maybe good to go to various foundation and community guys at BOF and ask if this would work

--> Rockett, Karen, Adam, Jordan, Kim → to prepare the preamble and get that to legal group for review in a week, then Kim can bring this to foundation/community people to get feedback (or buy-in); with goal of closing on this issue by two weeks/next legal meeting

(2) Discuss "Confidentiality" treatments.

• Re: CC-Zero allowing confidentiality provisions without conflict?
• 3 states:
• no confidentiality at all
• confidential for a certain period of time
• confidential
• issue more about SPDX trademark; ex. Motorola will use SPDX throughout, but if can't keep it confidential, then will still use it, but just won't call it "SPDX"
• strong reaction against tying trademark to this; engineers had negative reaction 
• concern was around ability to make changes and contribute it back and still be SPDX (mostly)
• need to give people a proscribed way to add fields, customize it, address extensibility - if we gave some explicit way to do this, might it alleviate some of these concerns?
• Always said we'd deal with extensibility with next version of spec 
• maybe raise confidentiality separately than compliance/trademark issue o working on technical proposal to separate… ??
• putting aside how marking of file is done, how about an open-ended field to site confidentiality? 
• Open-ended description/option seems fine to allow vendors to mark as needed
• Adam to get more feedback on what exactly was the concern around this

(3) Discuss finishing license "templatizing"

• how do you know that two license texts that look the same are actually the same; Kate had sent link summarizing where we were on this thus far.
• Normalizing to case and spacing; no swapping paragraphs; no changing punctuation; replacement of "copyright holder" or "author" fields, etc.
• Rockett, Jilayne, Kate - to dust that list off, make sure it makes sense and distribute to group for review and comment by rest of group