Georg said: >Yes. But that is a question of Copyright law, not license. > >Given that a document is under a license that permits modification, >any redistributor could add anything and then say that removing it >would hurt his or her moral rights. First of all, 'moral rights' don't exist in the US. In the UK, and all the Commonwealth countries, I believe they are limited to the right to be identified as the author. (All other similar rights are protected by libel & slander law, anti-fraud law, etc., which operate quite differently and really have no place in a copyright licence.) So your theory here is legally invalid in, essentially, the entire English-speaking world.
Second, even in other countries, I assume that moral rights are limited to something reasonable. A redistributor can *claim* that removing it would hurt his moral rights, but it doesn't make it *true*. He could also *claim* that removing it constitutes libel, slander, fraud, extortion, and theft, but it's still not *true*. I don't think that defending against the possibility of a quirk of Italian or French law being abused by an irresponsible person is worth the very real damage being done by 'invariant sections'. >Any license trying to allow modification/removal of such sections >would run a higher risk of being ruled invalid as a whole because >these are inalienable rights. As above, this is nonsense in most of the world. >So by having no possibility for invariant sections in a documentation >license, all you do is increase the possibility that it will one day >be ruled to be invalid as a whole. FUD, pure FUD. Has anything close to this ever *happened*? No. Please listen to us. The GFDL is causing real damage to the cause of free documentation for free software. And don't forget that it's GPL-incompatible. (*Both ways* in fact. GPLed code cannot be put into a GFDLed document, except through the 'fair use' provisions of copyright law, which get narrower every day. Which would be a serious flaw even if the GFDL was a free licence, which it's not.) --Nathanael Nerode
