[Plib-devel] Re: legal matters

[Melchior F. <mf...@us...>]

* Andy Ross -- Friday 08 July 2005 18:56:
> It's actually not wrong to claim copyright on the generated file.  You
> generated it, not Bitstream or Adobe or whoever.

That's AFAIK wrong. You may add your copyright (if you made substantial
changes?). Hey, that's what I did to the conversion utility! But you must
not replace the original by yours. And you must not change the license,
distribution terms etc. The mere conversion of data does *not* change
license and copyright!



> In practice, though, the fonts are freely redistributable in many
> formats (X11 bitmaps, for example) that don't even provide the ability
> to notate a copyright attribution.

That's encoded in the font file:

  $ gunzip -c /usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/75dpi/helvR14-ISO8859-1.pcf.gz|strings|grep Copyright
  Copyright (c) 1984, 1987 Adobe Systems Incorporated. All Rights Reserved. \
  Copyright (c) 1988, 1991 Digital Equipment Corporation. All Rights Reserved.

As there are no distribution terms, permissions, etc. given, we have to
assume that those of the whole Xorg/XFree distribution are to be applied.
See:

  $ find /usr/X11R6/|grep LICENSE
  /usr/X11R6/lib/X11/doc/LICENSE



> Simply including those formats isn't really a serious error, IMHO.
> But it's easy to correct. 

Well, now that I brought this up on a public list, nobody can say he
didn't know. It's in the archives. Sorry for that.  ;-)

Damn, I said I wouldn't care about that at all. Now it looks as if I do.
I don't!

m.   :-)