[Haskell] Re: haskell.org Public Domain

[Malcolm Wallace]

Wolfgang Jeltsch <wolfgang at jeltsch.net> writes:

> >   "I grant anyone the right to use this work for any purpose, without
> >    any conditions, unless such conditions are required by law,
> >    or explicitly claimed in the work for some clearly identifiable
> >    portion of the work.  No warranty of accuracy or fitness-for-purpose
> >    is implied for this work."
> 
> Does this mean that you have to adhere to the licenses of cited material?  

I don't know.  In the absence of information to the contrary, I
suppose yes.  One cannot assume free rights over other people's works.
However, if you have legal certainty that you do not need to adhere
to a licence in certain situations, that is up to you.

> What if you have just a short citation.  In Germany, for example, you have 
> "the right to cite" so that you don't have to accept any licenses for small 
> portions of copyrighted work.  (I suppose that this is similar in other 
> countries.)

Even if you have the right to cite small portions of copyrighted works,
I expect the law might require some form of attribution for those
quotations?  I don't know.  But these are the kind of conditions that
cannot be waived by a general grant of unconditional usage.  However,
my suggested text is meant to imply that if you add a quotation to the
wiki, you are the one who is responsible to attribute it correctly,
and to identify if it has a more restrictive license, or alternatively
that the quotation is sufficiently small that no attribution/license
is required.

The idea is that the /reader/ can be as free as possible to do what
they like with the text, because anything non-free will be clearly
identified for them.  Thus the burden of identifying non-free material
falls on the /author/.

> Longer parts of other work should better not included but linked to,
> shouldn't  it?

Indeed.

Regards,
    Malcolm