Email from Peaya - license for citation styles

adamsmith

I got this rather strange e-mail today:

Dear Sebastian,

I sincerely apologize for an improper use of CSL files created by you. The files was only briefly distributed in Peaya Cite. I have corrected the files to fully acknowledge you as the original author/contributor. Please let me know if you have any concerns.

I also want to express my deepest gratitude to you on your work. I wish to contribute to CSL community by making all my work freely available to public.

Again, please accept my apology. This won't happen again. While we met this way, I still hope we can keep in touch and discuss CSL in the future.

[name]

I'm curious what the license of the current CSLs is - I know noksagt has added GNU to some, but the majority doesn't have anything about license. I don't know much about this and am more curious than concerned about the implications. What obligations do commercial users of these styles have?

bdarcus

The email came because someone noticed they were using the styles after having stripped out the attribution content. So I guess they decided to contact individual authors before restoring it.

On your bigger question, I think the answer is we don't really know, but we need to clarify.

noksagt

This is a somewhat lengthy rant (bordering on bikeshedding), but I think the topic has proven to be an important one (and lawsuits by competitors & wider adoption of CSL by third party programs help to demonstrate this).

I'm curious what the license of the current CSLs is

They should absolutely specify the license to avoid ambiguity.

I know noksagt has added GNU to some, but the majority doesn't have anything about license.

Not quite. Styles that I created from scratch are released under CC-BY-SA:US/3.0. Any style that used one of my templates should be released under a similar license (but at least some that I know were based on mine do not include this information even in the Zotero repository).

I don't know much about this and am more curious than concerned about the implications. What obligations do commercial users of these styles have?

I am not a lawyer & this is not legal advice. If you want a real answer, please talk with a lawyer. But my understanding is that US copyright law reserves all rights. In the absence of explicit permission (whether by individual permission of the rights owner or, easier, by an included license), I do not think that companies that must comply with US copyright law have any rights to redistribute these files. One might be able to argue that they understood the styles were released under GPL-3 (the license of the Zotero project). But this also reserves some rights that were not being followed.

Personally, I would not redistribute any style file that did not have an explicit license (even though I'd probably be distributing them with a GPLed program that I develop).

We have 258 independent styles. Only 33 are licensed. Two use the LGPL. The rest are CC-BY-SA. I'd strongly encourage style authors to license their submissions! I'd also encourage repository maintainers to seek permission from authors to put an explicit license on stuff that is already submitted and to require future submissions to conform to one or more licenses that the repo maintainer agrees with.

Some have ignored the licensing issue or made the claim that style files are not copyrightable. Again: I am not a lawyer & don't profess to know. But Thomson Reuters believes that style files can be subject to licensing agreements and so I'm going to be sure to apply the license that I see fit to styles I create! I'm not tied to CC-BY-SA & will discuss relicensing my styles if needed.

More discussion on this topic is at:
http://forums.zotero.org/discussion/7048/the-license-of-csl-style-files-in-repository/
http://sourceforge.net/mailarchive/message.php?msg_id=fbb7c5df0905230715h13877713kd0a05b9c7a95d9d0@mail.gmail.com
http://sourceforge.net/mailarchive/message.php?msg_id=5a7ed81f0905231722y1d6abacby64d946b0f0debab3@mail.gmail.com
http://sourceforge.net/mailarchive/message.php?msg_id=fbb7c5df0905241002m1e50f60cgd7248d3dbe49899c@mail.gmail.com

adamsmith

Thanks noksagt, that's helpful - I agree it's probably a good idea to actually put a license on the styles.

I'd also encourage repository maintainers to seek permission from authors to put an explicit license on stuff that is already submitted

I'm happy to have CC-BY-SA applied to all the styles I (co-)authored -
the problem is that I don't think I started a single one from scratch literally - though I altered some so significantly that I'd think of myself as the primary author. But I think if Julian Onions, noksagt, Rintze, Bruce, Simon, Elena and me (and maybe I've forgotten one or two, but that seems fairly comprehensive) agree we should have a large share of styles covered.

Same problem applies to new styles I work on - they're almost always based on old styles and I don't think I should just put a license on something that's in effect a derivative work. When I work on noksagt's styles I leave the license intact (at least I really hope I did that every time - apologies otherwise).

Edit: I see that Rintze already OKd this in the other thread.

Simon

Unless there are objections, I'll be sending out an email in the next day to everyone who has submitted or contributed a style asking them to license their work under CC-BY-SA. I think it's important that it's clear that they are free to use and distribute, and equally important that everyone (including the original authors) can benefit from the modifications.

noksagt

Simon: This sounds good.

I'd also recommend that we make it clear to style modifiers that an easy/useful way to satisfy BY (attribution) is to use:<link rel="template/>and that an easy/useful way to satisfy SA is to retain the <rights/> tag that was in the original file.

bdarcus

Unless there are objections, I'll be sending out an email in the next day to everyone who has submitted or contributed a style asking them to license their work under CC-BY-SA.

No objections, but a suggestion: could you just say in the email "Unless you object, we will be updating all styles to the CC-BY-SA license ..."? E.g. make it opt out, and write a little script that does it all in one batch operation.

Simon

Currently, I plan to ask contributors to explicitly permit or deny permission to relicense under CC-BY-SA. For legal reasons, I think it's better to have explicit permission—Mozilla's relicensing required approval from each individual contributor. If we can't get responses from some of the contributors, we can determine what to do with those styles at a later date.

bdarcus

But Mozilla was dealing with code subject to copyright? I still wish we could get some advice on these details from a lawyer.

dstillman

What's the difference? If the styles aren't in fact copyrightable, the CC-BY-SA doesn't apply anyway, right?

bdarcus

My point is not to avoid inconsistency; it is simply to say that I don't think any of us have a clue what we're doing (legally). I certainly don't.

If we don't have access to a proper IP lawyer, then this seems better than nothing. But given previous issues around this, it would be nice to have a lawyer look at this.

fbennett

I am not a practicing lawyer and know little to nothing about IP, but as far as I know, what noksagt says about copyright in the US is correct: copyright attaches from the act of publication, even if no explicit licensing statement is attached to the content. [1] There is a threshold question of what constitutes copyrightable material (the phone book doesn't qualify, etc), but on the assumption that CSL styles are within scope, you would want to get individual consents.

[1] In the event of dispute, the lack of notice and failure to register the copyright will basically torpedo any claim for damages, but copyright per se does attach. The basic rules are laid out in US Copyright Act, secs. 401, 404, 405 & 408.

Rintze

Perhaps Wikipedia offers a good analogous case? Like CSL styles in a repository, Wikipedia articles are freely available, often have multiple contributors, and can be subject to branching.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Copyrights