Dave Winer <dave@userland.com> wrote:
Julian, I think there's a disconnect. The copyright is for the writing, not the format. If you write a spec, which you can, it would have your copyright on it. If you want one without a copyright, write it. I'm still pretty sure it'll have a copyright, whether or not you specifically claim it. I am not a lawyer. You might want to check in with the Creative Commons people, they *are* lawyers. The timing is excellent. I've cc'd this to Sally Khudairi who's working with them. Dave
It's always the minor points that generate the most discussion! I've just scanned the RFCs and it appears that the IETF copyright notices started to appear around RFC2215 in about Oct 97. Prior to that there was no copyright notice except that for the words, implied by the author being named. I checked RFC822 as a sample before writing the original post. I should have looked later.
And yes, the copyright notice at http://backend.userland.com/rss#copyrightAndDisclaimer is reasonable and explicitly notes, "Further, while these copyright restrictions apply to the written RSS specification, no claim of ownership is made by UserLand to the format it describes". As you say, Userland is explicitly not claiming ownership of the spec, which is good. And further, "Any party may, for commercial or non-commercial purposes, implement this format without royalty or license fee to UserLand." which is rather different from the RAND (reasonable and non-discriminatory) terms applied by IBM and Microsoft to WSDL (for instance).
But despite writing all that, I don't really want to talk about the copyright any more. It was a passing comment at the end of a post and not that important. It was as much a plea for a return to the early (and naive) days of the Internet as a specific comment about RSS 0.94.
I'd much rather talk about the spec and what's in it. -- Julian Bond Email&MSM: julian.bond@voidstar.com Webmaster: http://www.ecademy.com/ Personal WebLog: http://www.voidstar.com/ CV/Resume: http://www.voidstar.com/cv/ M: +44 (0)77 5907 2173 T: +44 (0)192 0412 433