[od-discuss] UK OGL Compliant?

Wed Jan 4 22:52:14 UTC 2012

On Sun, Jan 1, 2012 at 11:56 AM, Herb Lainchbury
<herb at dynamic-solutions.com> wrote:
> Mike,
> To make sure I understand you, I think you're saying:
>
> restrictions 1b and 1c should be permitted under the opendefintion
> the clause I drafted raises the issue of DRM/TPM restrictions

Right.

> My thoughts:
>
> Restrictions 1b and 1c are already covered by laws in most countries
> (fraud).  While these restrictions don't appear to impose any additional
> constraints on consumers, I wouldn't want to have that argument be the basis
> for allowing all sorts of redundant restrictions.  Publishers, however, seem
> to be sensitive about this and feel the need to reiterate the law in this
> particular instance.  If we don't allow this, we run the risk of eliminating
> existing licenses on this basis, which I would rather not do.  I would
> probably favour allowing these two particular restrictions, which would mean
> one more small change to the opendefinition.

I agree.

> I think that DRM/TPM needs to be restricted, however, doesn't my proposed
> clause cover this by restricting ALL other restrictions?  If we feel we need
> to explicitly include a clause about this then we could potentially adapt
> language from CC which says: "You may not impose any effective technological
> measures on the Work that restrict the ability of a recipient of the Work
> from You to exercise the rights granted to that recipient under the terms of
> the License."

For a *work* to be open, OKD addresses this in point 4, abcense of
technical restrictions. Possibly DRM should be mentioned in the text
for readability and optimization (ha, but seriously), but the
substance doesn't need changing.

Your proposed clause concerns *license* conditions; it disallows
licenses with ones not explicitly permitted by the OKD.

You may think open licenses ought include conditions prohibiting DRM,
in which case OKD ought to explicitly say such conditions permitted in
compliant licenses.

(DRM prohibitions have a history of being somewhat controversial;
personally I like the GPLv3 approach of instead permitting
circumvention ... it is conceivable that CC BY/BY-SA 4.0 could take
that path, obviating the issue, but there are of course extant
perceived as OKD compliant licenses ie CC BY/BY-SA <=3.0 and also ODbL
1.0 -- depending on how much parallel distribution is seen as making
DRM prohibition a non-prohibition -- that probably ought be more
clearly compliant through addressing DRM restrictions in the OKD, and
depending on the salience of DRM in the future, probably other future
licenses will address it, sometimes through prohibition.)

Mike

> ps.  Happy New Year all!

Likewise & apologies for delayed reply.

Mike