I find no-advertising clauses like the following annoying: Except as contained in this notice, the name(s) of the above copyright holders shall not be used in advertising or otherwise to promote the sale, use or other dealings in this Software without prior written authorization.
They annoy me for a few reasons: 1) They're not necessary, at least in my jurisdiction, and I suspect not in most or all other jurisdictions of interest to Debian. 2) The right of publicity, unlike the distribution of copies of a work, is not an "exclusive right" that is retained by copyright holders under copyright law in my jurisdiction, and I suspect not in others, either. Therefore, attaching such a restriction term to a copyright notice may very well be null and void. A contract would have to be formed between the copyright holder and the user for this restriction to attach. 3) Perpetuating language like this in licenses just confuses innocent bystanders into putting irrelevant clauses into their own licenses. We do the community no favors by encouraging authors to misunderstand copyright, particularly through the ritualistic duplication of old errors. In the United States, there are several legal remedies available to people whose names or likenesses are misappropriated for advertising or promotional purposes. The following web site enumerates some: http://www.law.cornell.edu/topics/publicity.html You'll note that none of these remedies are grounded on copyright law. Copyright is irrelevant. I would therefore like to make two requests of debian-legal: A) Can folks in other countries help us find out if publicity rights are recognized there? Does any jurisdiction in the world automatically grant copyright licensees permission to use the copyright holder's name or likeness in advertising or publicity? B) If we find that most jurisdictions of interest to Debian handle publicity rights substantially as the U.S. does, can we please more actively discourage their use? If my understanding is correct, let's get the word out that these "license terms" are unnecessary and only promote confusion about copyright. For what it's worth, I think the NetBSD Foundation has already reached this conclusion, which is why they use a 2-clause form of the BSD license, with both the compelled-advertising and no-advertising clauses removed. -- G. Branden Robinson | Reality is what refuses to go away Debian GNU/Linux | when I stop believing in it. [EMAIL PROTECTED] | -- Philip K. Dick http://people.debian.org/~branden/ |
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