Free as in Freedom

0x53: Can Plagiarism Happen Under Copyleft?


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Bradley and Karen discuss what plagiarism is (or isn't) and how it

interacts with copyleft licenses.

Show Notes:
Segment 0 (00:00:37)
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  • Conservancy, where Bradley and Karen work, by becoming a
    supporter.
  • Karen mentioned
  • her blog post about the supporter program. (00:08:30)
  • Bradley mentioned
  • his blog post about the supporter program as well. (00:09:30)
    Segment 1 (00:16:16)
    • Bradley and Karen pick up on a topic original discussed in Segment 1
    • of FaiF 0x02.
      (00:16:50)
    • Bradley discussed the Laurie
    • Stearns' article from the California Law Review, entitled
      Copy Wrong: Plagiarism, Process, Property, and the Law
      (00:23:50)
    • Bradley mentioned The
    • GNOME Foundation Copyright Assignment Guidelines that he
      co-authored. (00:28:05)
    • Bradley mentioned the Doris
    • Kearns Goodwin Plagiarism controversy, and how it would have been
      simply redressed if the material she reused had been
      copylefted. (00:29:26)
    • Karen mentioned that
    • Flickr
      made different policies for CC-BY-SA'd works when selling printed
      versions. (32:30)
    • Bradley mentioned that even software freedom advocates just comply
    • with the copyleft licenses and don't work collaboratively, particularly
      during hostile forks, using Conservancy's
      Kallithea project as an example. (00:35:25)
    • Bradley reiterated a point he made in FaiF 0x08,
    • where he discussed that Linus Torvalds switched to GPL for Linux because
      he realized non-commercial restrictions weren't appropriate. (00:37:50)
    • Bradley mentioned the hostile fork of GCC called egcs.
    • The H-Online years later wrote a long article that discussed the egcs fork
      egcs fork. (00:39:46)
    • Bradley mentioned that plagiarism is ultimately about attribution, and
    • modern DVCS systems makes attribution easy and renders plagiarism
      impossible (if DVCS logs are accurate). (00:44:15)
    • Bradley mentioned that he continually has learned the lesson that if
    • you let your employer keep copyright, you lose everything you had when you
      switch employers (if the work isn't copylefted). (00:47:00)
    • Bradley discussed the methods of attribution required in
    • GPLv3. (00:50:05)
    • Bradley mentioned that copyright notices are the primary method of
    • attribution in copyleft licenses, and even non-copyleft ones
      too. (00:53:19)
    • Karen discussed the attribution requirements in text of
    • CC-BY-SA 4.0. (00:53:49)
    • Bradley wants to do a whole FaiF show about how CC-BY-SA
    • may not be a true copyleft since it has no source code requirement
      (00:54:40)
    • Bradley mentioned the “fake name” that film directors use
    • when they wish to disavow a work they aren't happy with. The name is, in
      fact, Alan
      Smithee, and indeed the 1984 film Dune
      lists Smithee as a director even though David Lynch is known publicly to
      be the director. (00:58:40)
    • Bradley mentioned the unfair
    • accusations against Red Hat when they stopped publishing their internal
      Linux Git repository and instead released a more standard
      ChangeLog. (01:05:30)

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