Hello legal@,
I have a question about a copyright header on a file that looks dubious to me, but I wanted to get an opinion from here.
https://github.com/alberthdev/spasm-ng/blob/master/inc/ti83plus.inc is the file in question; it's an z80 assembly include written for the TI-83+, a graphing calculator made by Texas Instruments. The file was originally written by TI and made freely available, but it includes the following copyright notice:
;====================================================================== ; Include File for the TI-83 Plus ; Last Updated 11/09/2001 ; ; Copyright (c) 1999, 2001 Texas Instruments: The Licensed Materials are ; copyrighted by TI. LICENSEE agrees that it will ; not delete the copyright notice, trademarks or ; protective notices from any copy made by LICENSEE. ; ; Warranty: TI does not warrant that the Licensed Materials will ; be free from errors or will meet your specific requirements. ; The Licensed Materials are made available "AS IS" to LICENSEE. ; ; Limitations: TI MAKES NO WARRANTY OR CONDITION, EITHER EXPRESS ; OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO ANY IMPLIED ; WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY AND FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE, ; REGARDING THE LICENSED MATERIALS. IN NO EVENT SHALL ; TI OR ITS SUPPLIERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY INDIRECT, INCIDENTAL ; OR CONSEQUENTIAL DAMAGES, LOSS OF PROFITS, LOSS OF USE OR DATA, ; OR INTERRUPTION OF BUSINESS, WHETHER THE ALLEGED DAMAGES ARE ; LABELED IN TORT, CONTRACT OR INDEMNITY. ;
The calculator hacking community has since modified this file, and redistributes it in a lot of projects (many of which are open source). However, as best as I can tell, this copyright statement does not explicitly grant the right to redistribute this file. My thinking then is that Fedora cannot ship it. But I'd be interested in getting a second opinion.
This is redistributed by spasm-ng (a z80 assembler), which I'm in the process of packaging; but due to this licensing question, I've elected *not* to ship the file. (The rest of spasm-ng is GPLv2; it's just this include file that is dubious). The package is perfectly functional without it, since, as I said, most authors include this as part of their projects anyway.
Thanks in advance, Ben Rosser
"BR" == Ben Rosser rosser.bjr@gmail.com writes:
BR> However, as best as I can tell, this copyright statement does not BR> explicitly grant the right to redistribute this file.
It doesn't give permission to modify, either, or (of course) to redistribute modified copies.
There may be other grants of permission outside of that header which might grant such permissions. Is there a full statement of license anywhere? Are there other statements from TI floating about the web which say that the file can be modified and redistributed?
It might be possible to simply obtain a statement of these permissions from TI.
- J<
On Tue, Aug 30, 2016 at 10:41 AM, Jason L Tibbitts III tibbs@math.uh.edu wrote:
"BR" == Ben Rosser rosser.bjr@gmail.com writes:
BR> However, as best as I can tell, this copyright statement does not BR> explicitly grant the right to redistribute this file.
It doesn't give permission to modify, either, or (of course) to redistribute modified copies.
There may be other grants of permission outside of that header which might grant such permissions. Is there a full statement of license anywhere? Are there other statements from TI floating about the web which say that the file can be modified and redistributed?
It might be possible to simply obtain a statement of these permissions from TI.
- J<
The file is (or, rather, was) distributed as a "related download" alongside the TI-83+ SDK. We (that is, the calculator hacking community) did some digging and found the full license terms on a cached version of the download page for the SDK, but they are extremely restrictive: see https://github.com/alberthdev/spasm-ng/issues/37#issuecomment-243555962. (Note that some related discussion is going on in that ticket).
It isn't entirely clear, though, if this license just applies to the SDK or if it also applies to the include file and all the other "related downloads" on the SDK page.
If there are any other statements from TI on this issue, I'm not aware of them, unfortunately.
We could attempt to contact TI, I suppose. There are people in the calculator hacking community who have a reasonably good relationship with people who work for their calculator division.
Ben Rosser
It would be useful to have a lawyer provide an opinion on exactly what can be done with such a file, and of course you almost certainly won't get one here, though I'm sure someone here might be able to point you to a lawyer who is willing to provide advice, perhaps even without cost.
But here are some decidedly non-lawyer musings. As to the file, I'm pretty sure it's subject to copyright even though all it contains (from a cursory glance) is a mapping from names to numbers. It's essentially documentation of an API and that's been quite an interesting legal subject lately. Plus, at least some versions of that file contain original work. Given that the original version of the file is available, it should be trivial to separate out that original work.
Someone in some less restrictive jurisdiction than the US should write up some original documentation for the API, using whatever information they have available. The actual symbol names (or at least some of them) appear to be documented in the SDK, so it should be perfectly OK to include those in said documentation.
Some other enterprising person might be inclined to take that nice documentation and create an include file to make it easy for programmers to use the API without having to define all of those numbers themselves. I can think of at least one convenient name for such a file. This file could of course be under any license the author might choose.
- J<
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Ben Rosser -
Jason L Tibbitts III