[ILUG] The old CD thread again {RHEL this time}

[Rick Moen]

Quoting Paul Jakma (paul at clubi.ie):

> >OTOH, Rick Moen's http://linuxmafia.com/faq/RedHat/rhel-isos.html says:
> >
> >	structure and organization are owned by Red Hat and others and are
> >	protected under copyright and other laws. Title to the Software
>                         ^^^^^^^^^
> 
> >	This agreement does not permit Customer to distribute the Software
> >	using Red Hat's trademarks.
> 
> 
> >	or other permission granted, then Customer must modify the files
> >	identified as "REDHAT-LOGOS" and "anaconda-images" to remove all
> >	images containing the "Red Hat" trademark or the "Shadowman" logo.
> >	Merely deleting these files may corrupt the Software.
> 
> >	So, Red Hat, Inc. are saying that they condition your right  to
> >	commercially redistribute the copyrighted images they speak of on
> >	your compliance with the trademark policy policy viewable on their
> >	Web site --- which states conditions above and beyond those
> >	actually required by trademark law. Note that they place no such
> >	condition on non-commercial distribution.  "
> 
> Rick, as is often the case, invents things to argue against.
> 
> RedHat's basis for disallowing copying clearly is copyright. That 
> RedHat are also keen to point out that these copyrighted images 
> further are/may be trademarked is besides the point.

I'm afraid Paul is the one who is entirely missing the point, this time:  
The point is that the redhat-logos and anaconda-images RPMs' licence 
terms explicitly deny grant of a copyright licence to anyone who is
not willing to abide by Red Hat's posted corporate trademark policy.

Thus, if your commercial usage (e.g., commercial redistribution) 
contravenes that trademark policy, then, lacking licence to those 
two packages, it commits the tort of copyright violation as to the
two RPMs.



> >However, 'rpm -qi redhat-logos' on an RHEL3 system returns:
> >
> >	"License: Copyright ? 1999-2002 Red Hat, Inc.  All rights
> >	 reserved."
> 
> Tada.
> 
> >Which, presumably, ties redistribution of these logos to a software EULA
> >or common copyright law.
> 
> Uhuh.

Um, that phrase is almost entirely meaningless:  Other than its possible 
consequences in the one or two remaining non-Berne Convention countries, 
it's a legal NOOP.  But including that phrase is a long-established
belt-and-suspenders habit, and additionally serves the useful purpose of 
notifying people of copyright claims about as well as any alternative,
so it persists.

> It is *spelled out* in the RHEL EULA/contract which i see online on 
> RedHat's website:
> 
> RHEL is GPL licenced as a collective work *except* for REDHAT-LOGOS 
> and anaconda-images.

You seem to be over-interpreting the phrase "collective work" in this
context.  To slightly misquote Inigo Montoya:  "You keep using that
phrase.  I do not think it means what you think it does."

In the first place, "collective work" is a term of art in copyright law
for a particular sort of multi-author ownership of a creative work, and 
applies slightly different standards of rights and obligations compared
to the alternative multi-author copyright law theory, "joint work".  For
the fine details, please see Eric and Cathy Raymond's Licensing HOWTO.

_Obviously_, that phrase cannot be intended to apply to each of the
hundreds of constituent codebases individually, because RH, Inc. simply
does not own copyright title to most of them.  It would be obvious to 
anyone seeking to apply copyright law (e.g., a judge) that the intended
reference is to Red Hat's "compilation copyright" on the collective
entity of the CDs as a whole.  That title is separate from, and in
addition to, the property rights in each of the constituent works.

The classic illustration of "compilation copyright" is the title an
editor of a fiction anthology gains, upon publication:  He might not
have written (or own copyright title over) any of the constituent
stories, but the law recognises the creative effort involved in
selecting and arranging those third-party works, and grants him title
(ownership) over that accomplishment as a copyrightable property.

Thus, Steven King, Tony Hillerman, and the other authors he anthologised
cannot in the future do an end-run around the editor by republishing the 
exact same arrangement of their works elsewhere without the original
editor's involvement:  Their doing so without his permission would
commit a tort against the original editor.

Anyhow, the quoted phrase asserts a _compilation copyright_ over RHEL's 
selection and arrangement of third-party software, and the concluding 
phrase rather sloppily stresses that two of the packages included have 
vastly different terms than does the compilation as a whole.  (It's a
badly written sentence.)