[XML-DEV Mailing List Archive Home] [By Thread] [By Date] [Recent Entries] [Reply To This Message] Re: A call for open source DTDs
Scott Vanderbilt <lists@l...> writes: > Regarding copyright ownership of DTD: > > Copyright law protects expressions of ideas, not the underlying ideas > themselves. In many instances, a well-written DTD can only be expressed in > a particular manner, with allowances made for naming of elements, > attributes, etc. Therefore, any protection under copyright law would be > limited, because the scope of copyright protection is proportional to the > range of expression available to articulate the underlying ideas > communicated by the DTD. This is called the "merger doctrine" and is well > known in copyright law, especially with regard to the area of computers. I beg to differ. The effort involved in the construction of substantial DTDs such as those from the DocBook or TEI is a least as much in the articulation of the ideas in the formal schema language of SGML DTDs as in the original document structure ideas themselves. As such, I think any unlicensed redistribution of those DTDs would be a clear and easily prosecuted case of copyright infringement. In any case, as it stands a DTD is a document, and documents are ipso facto copyright by their authors. You're certainly correct that if I made a rational reconstruction of the DocBook or TEI DTD functionality, I'd be on pretty safe ground, and even if I expanded all the parameter entity references of e.g. the TEI under a given set of switch settings, I might be able to get away with redistribution of the result, although that's MUCH less clear. The parallel with QuickSort is illuminating. If I redistribute YOUR awk implementation of QuickSort, with our without relabling some of the variables, I've violated your copyright. If I code QuickSort myself in perl, I'm just fine. If I use a2p on your source and redistribute the results, the lawyers will have a field day. ht -- Henry S. Thompson, HCRC Language Technology Group, University of Edinburgh 2 Buccleuch Place, Edinburgh EH8 9LW, SCOTLAND -- (44) 131 650-4440 Fax: (44) 131 650-4587, e-mail: ht@c... URL: http://www.ltg.ed.ac.uk/~ht/ xml-dev: A list for W3C XML Developers. To post, mailto:xml-dev@i... Archived as: http://www.lists.ic.ac.uk/hypermail/xml-dev/ To (un)subscribe, mailto:majordomo@i... the following message; (un)subscribe xml-dev To subscribe to the digests, mailto:majordomo@i... the following message; subscribe xml-dev-digest List coordinator, Henry Rzepa (mailto:rzepa@i...)
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