Re: Adding advisory notification for non-ELPA package.el downloads

[Paul Rankin <hello@paulwrankin.com>]

On Fri, 21 Jul 2017, at 01:08 AM, Eli Zaretskii wrote:
> > From: Paul Rankin <hello@paulwrankin.com>
> > Cc: rms@gnu.org, emacs-devel@gnu.org
> > Date: Fri, 21 Jul 2017 00:36:40 +1000
> > 
> > Copyright is not merely functional, and you're reducing it to even
> > lesser functional purposes by arguing that given assigning copyright to
> > the FSF retains the subset of functional purposes of copyright that are
> > important to you, then they are effectively the same and should be
> > treated the same for everyone. Copyright is not its function, rather its
> > functions arise as the manifestations of the importance we see in
> > authorship as ownership. That's a symbolic importance, and while that
> > may not mean much to you, it's where all the functional purposes above
> > come from. Owning a thing, and having rights to that thing as if you
> > owned it, are not the same thing.
> 
> AFAIK, the original author still owns the code he/she wrote, even
> after the assignment, and the authorship information is not lost by
> assigning the copyright.  If that is true, then your concerns are
> based on misunderstandings.

I'm sorry to disagree with you, but no, if you assign copyright to
someone else, you no longer own the work. Hence why FSF licences the
work back to you.

It may be the case that the FSF is entering into joint ownership
agreements with authors, but going off the passage you quoted before, I
don't think that's the case. Such agreements would also make the FSF's
legal standing very difficult if they ever needed to defend against
infringement.

The authorship information (or "moral rights") is not really what I'm
talking about, but specifically copyright ownership.

> I would like to stress that it's IMO okay not to agree to assign
> copyright, for whatever reasons.  We just need to make sure that
> people don't make these decisions based on misconceptions about what
> the assignment means, legally and practically, for the original author
> of the code.  Once the decision is an informed one, it's eventually
> the call of each one of us whether to assign or not.

I agree. But let's make sure it really is informed and people know
that assigning copyright means assigning ownership. We can argue about
what it really means to "own" something, but I doubt anyone wants to
hear that.

I didn't really want to get into a debate about *why* I did not want to
assign copyright, rather just that there are people out there who don't,
for good reasons, and so decisions about Emacs development maybe should
not be made based on the perspective that everyone would assign
copyright if they only were adequately informed.