On Mon, 2002-11-04 at 13:54, Henning Makholm wrote: > Man, you're way out. Some people (not all developers) point out that > the Database Directive exists. Not a word has been said about it being > "supreme" in any way. It exists. That is all. It that so har to grasp?
Since we acknowledge that it exists, what should we do about it? The problem seems to be centered around the DEC word lists. From my reading of the license, it seems that the original author of the DEC list make a serious good-faith effort to identify the contributors to the list. I doubt that tracking down the remaining authors would be practically possible, given that we are now removed by two additional layers of incorporation from them. In addition, it is worth noting that DEC was a US corporation, and remains US-owned. I also note from Kevin's site that he lives in the USA. Finally, Debian's main sites are located in the USA. The Database Directive of the EU, therefore, does not have the impact that, for example, the USA crypto laws have. Finally, I don't know how old the Database Directive is, and whether its terms are retroactive. This may have an effect on the status of the DEC list if it can be established that it was created before the Database Directive went into effect. So, given that we have: - a good-faith effort to respect rights that may not even have existed at the time, - no way of identifying additional authors besides those contacted by DEC, - a significant burden of proof on the part of any claimant, given that said claimant did not respond at the time of DEC's inquiry in addition to the ease which alphabetized word lists may be generated, - significant jurisdictional issues surrounding the applicability of the Database Directive to DEC, the upstream author, or Debian itself, - a significant likelihood that we would be joined in legal liability by Hewlett-Packard, the current owners of DEC's assets and a friendly ally of both free software and the Debian project, I vote that we treat the copyright to this list the same way we treat patents generally: wait for someone to complain before pulling the list. The situation is analogous; just as we cannot know which patents we currently infringe upon, given the volume of patents and the volume of code we distribute, so here we cannot know which copyrights we infringe upon, due to our disconnection from their original authors. At any rate, it seems unlikely to me that anyone will be able to hold us responsible for willful infringement given the circumstances surrounding any holder's disregard for his/her rights up to this point.
