Legal Team/Minutes/2011-09-21

Attendees

• 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…

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

Action: 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

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

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