[Openfontlibrary] Non-Copyleft Openfontlibrary

[Liam R E Quin]

On Mon, 2008-11-03 at 18:01 +0800, Jon Phillips wrote:
> On Mon, 2008-11-03 at 04:32 -0500, Fontfreedom at aol.com wrote:
> > In a message dated 11/2/2008 10:26:10 PM Pacific Standard Time,
> > liam at holoweb.net writes:

> > Canada does indeed have a public domain.
> > In fact, there are even Canadian public domain websites...
> > http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20071022-european-copyright-law-used-to-threaten-canadian-public-domain-site.html

The term "public domain" there is used to mean "copyright has expired",
which is actually a slightly different thing than the US legal
concept of "public domain", as I understand it.

In Canada you can waive your moral rights to be identified
as the author of a work, and your moral right that the integrity of the
work be preserved, and you can (separately) assign copyright to some
other legal entity, all of which must be done in writing.  So you can
cone close, but C-64 does not, for example, anywhere that I can find contain
the phrase "public domain" and does not recognise such as thing as a
possible recipient for copyright assignment.

At any rate, I'm not a copyright lawyer :-) I just consulted a
little with some people when starting my Web site,
http://www.fromoldbooks.org/

If you have an organisation to which people can assign their
copyright, and a place to record the fact that they explicitly
waived their moral rights, you can get pretty much the same
effect I think.  We just have to be careful to use terminology
that is likely to be recognised by a Canadian court, and that was
really my concern, I'm not trying to be argumentative :-)

Of course, in the US, one could take a "public domain" font and
re-release it under GPL... with no other changes.

Liam

[1] http://laws.justice.gc.ca/en/showdoc/cs/C-42///en?page=1


-- 
Liam Quin - XML Activity Lead, W3C, http://www.w3.org/People/Quin/
Pictures from old books: http://fromoldbooks.org/
Ankh: irc.sorcery.net irc.gnome.org www.advogato.org