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Is that necessarily a bug? If you use Disney content without a license they won't give you a 30-day period to keep mis-using it. Same with using Oracle software

by gkbrk 3y ago

Is that necessarily a bug? If you use Disney content without a license they won't give you a 30-day period to keep mis-using it. Same with using Oracle software. Why should people who create CC content provide such a grace period?

jvanderbot 3y ago
Validity of the post aside, there are real-world examples of this license being abused by third parties. Given the cost is very low to just change the license, I think it might be worth considering.
- skissane 3y ago
  To be clear, the issue we are talking about here does not exist for the CC0 license TinySSH is using. CC0 lacks a termination clause, it wouldn't make sense for it to have one. It only exists for other CC licenses, like the (earlier versions of) CC-BY(-NC/-SA). CC0 has other issues – some people (e.g. Red Hat Legal) are concerned about its language explicitly excluding patent and trademark rights, and think that is legally inferior to other public domain declarations (such as The Unlicense) which don't mention that topic at all. In a declaration/license in which patents and trademarks go unmentioned, if the original author sues you on those grounds, you can try to argue that by releasing the software they gave you an implied patent/trademark license – that argument may or may not win in Court, but at least it has a chance. With language in the declaration/license explicitly excluding patents and trademarks (like CC0 has), that argument is likely dead-on-arrival.
saagarjha 3y ago
Because people who create CC content typically do so because they want it to be available to good-faith uses, which may not always follow the exact requirements of the license by accident
jasomill 3y ago
For the reason given by Doctorow in the linked article: If you put a CC license on your work, its explicit message is, “I want you to re-use this.” Not “I am a pedantic asshole with a fetish for well-formed attribution strings.” The point of CC is not to teach the world to write attribution strings: it is to facilitate sharing and re-use. If you are a good-faith user of CC licenses, then your response to an incorrect attribution string should be a request to correct it, not a threat to sue for $150,000 in statutory damages.

by gkbrk 3y ago

jvanderbot 3y ago

Validity of the post aside, there are real-world examples of this license being abused by third parties. Given the cost is very low to just change the license, I think it might be worth considering.

skissane 3y ago
To be clear, the issue we are talking about here does not exist for the CC0 license TinySSH is using. CC0 lacks a termination clause, it wouldn't make sense for it to have one. It only exists for other CC licenses, like the (earlier versions of) CC-BY(-NC/-SA). CC0 has other issues – some people (e.g. Red Hat Legal) are concerned about its language explicitly excluding patent and trademark rights, and think that is legally inferior to other public domain declarations (such as The Unlicense) which don't mention that topic at all. In a declaration/license in which patents and trademarks go unmentioned, if the original author sues you on those grounds, you can try to argue that by releasing the software they gave you an implied patent/trademark license – that argument may or may not win in Court, but at least it has a chance. With language in the declaration/license explicitly excluding patents and trademarks (like CC0 has), that argument is likely dead-on-arrival.

saagarjha 3y ago

Because people who create CC content typically do so because they want it to be available to good-faith uses, which may not always follow the exact requirements of the license by accident

jasomill 3y ago

For the reason given by Doctorow in the linked article: If you put a CC license on your work, its explicit message is, “I want you to re-use this.” Not “I am a pedantic asshole with a fetish for well-formed attribution strings.” The point of CC is not to teach the world to write attribution strings: it is to facilitate sharing and re-use. If you are a good-faith user of CC licenses, then your response to an incorrect attribution string should be a request to correct it, not a threat to sue for $150,000 in statutory damages.