A way to log origin for attribution

[silverhook]

Some (mostly content) licenses either directly ask for or encourage, for the origin of the licensed material.

To quote from CC-BY-4.0, which is then repeat throughout all of CC licenses (emphasis mine):

Section 3 – License Conditions.

Your exercise of the Licensed Rights is expressly made subject to the following conditions.

a. Attribution.

1. If You Share the Licensed Material (including in modified form), You must:

A. retain the following if it is supplied by the Licensor with the Licensed Material:

i. identification of the creator(s) of the Licensed Material and any others designated to receive attribution, in any reasonable manner requested by the Licensor (including by pseudonym if designated);

ii. a copyright notice; iii. a notice that refers to this Public License; iv. a notice that refers to the disclaimer of warranties; v. a URI or hyperlink to the Licensed Material to the extent reasonably practicable;

B. indicate if You modified the Licensed Material and retain an indication of any previous modifications; and

C. indicate the Licensed Material is licensed under this Public License, and include the text of, or the URI or hyperlink to, this Public License.

As an example of a license that does not require, but encourages the notice of such an notice of origin, I refer to the Unsplash license

For a future version of REUSE spec, we might want to look into whether we can reasonably add an optional (SPDX?) tag to mark origin, where this is required. This would be most practical for binary content such as images, fonts etc.

[mxmehl]

Good idea for future versions of REUSE. However, as with Copyright Text, coordination with SPDX and other projects is key.

The quoted excerpt of CC-BY-4.0 is very interesting. Section 3 (B) is not easy to fulfill just with REUSE, but I am also not certain whether this is our scope.

[silverhook]

§3.B could be fulfillable with REUSE, if we chose to adopt it, but if we do so, I would suggest to simply allow for optional comments both in the header (which we implicitly already do), as well as in the *.license files (which we might want to explicitly state).

Note that this notification of modification issue exists also for the GPL family of licenses, so at least allowing for this in a free-form way could be useful. This could be as simple as stating in the FAQ, that if a license requires such notices, you may simply use comments in the header (or *.license file) to describe it.

[silverhook]

I just checked the current (3.0a1) spec and it seems to me we could already abuse the SPDX-Copyright (soon to be SPDX-FileCopyrightText it seems).

From what I understand the following might not be what REUSE suggests (or intended), but still perfectly valid by REUSE 3.0 spec:

SPDX-FileCopyrightText: © 2014 Matija Šuklje <matija@suklje.name> as found on <https://matija.suklje.name/ceci-nest-pas-une-pipe>
SPDX-License-Identifier: CC-BY-4.0

…should satisfy https://wiki.creativecommons.org/wiki/best_practices_for_attribution

and

SPDX-FileCopyrightText: Photo by Jeremy Bishop <https://unsplash.com/photos/KFIjzXYg1RM> on Unsplash <https://unsplash.com/>
SPDX-License-Identifier: LicenseRef-Unsplash

…is pretty much a direct implementation of the suggestion on https://unsplash.com/license

This way might get a bit messy once we get into modifications and how to squeeze those into the copyright/attribution field.

[mxmehl]

Thanks for the overview. I would also be rather in favour of putting such things in an extra line. While using the Copyright/FileCopyrightText header would be valid REUSE, it's rather off our recommendation <year> <name> <email> which I find very good for oversight and consistency.

Perhaps this discussion is worth to be started within the SPDX legal team first, or even wider forums?

[silverhook]

On sreda, 24. julij 2019 17:14:31 CEST, Max Mehl wrote:

Thanks for the overview. I would also be rather in favour of putting such things in an extra line. While using the Copyright/FileCopyrightText header would be valid REUSE, it's rather off our recommendation which I find very good for oversight and consistency.

I very much agree. But it would still be valid to according to the spec ;)

Perhaps this discussion is worth to be started within the SPDX legal team first, or even wider forums?

Sure, happy to open a thread on SPDX Legal mailing list.

-- gsm: tel:+386.41.849.552 www: https://matija.suklje.name xmpp: matija.suklje@gabbler.org sip: matija_suklje@ippi.fr

[carmenbianca]

I believe this can be solved more elegantly. I believe what SPDX wants to do for their next version of the spec, is to allow the user to pick any section from the SPDX spec, and tag-ify it. Ergo, "File Copyright Text" becomes "SPDX-FileCopyrightText". Thus, we could pick any section from the spec and use it to convey the origin information.

For instance:

SPDX-PackageHomePage or SPDX-PackageDownloadLocation.

Unfortunately, there is nothing at the "File" level for this. Perhaps this is something that SPDX could be prompted about.

[silverhook]

I am asking SPDX about this already. I agree, this would be best solved first in SPDX itself, and then used or allowed in REUSE.

[silverhook]

I opened a the thread on SPDX-Legal on this topic but so far no useful solution popped up.

For the time being, I will use the following work-around internally, but am very much looking forward to a standardised solution later on:

SPDX-FileCopyrightText: © 2017 Peter Janzen <https://cc0.photo/author/peter/>
SPDX-License-Identifier: CC0-1.0

Origin: <https://cc0.photo/2017/06/04/huge-headframe-zeche-zollverein-essen/>

This relies on the fact that neither the spec nor the reuse tool seem to (actively) forbid use of additional text in the header or, by association, the *.license file.

[mxmehl]

It seems the SPDX-Legal discussion led to no conclusion, although I'd like to see such a tag as well. I'm not sure whether an issue here is useful, as REUSE's focus is on copyright and licensing.

I'll close therefore, but please feel free to reopen if you think otherwise.

[silverhook]

I gave it a bit more thought and we could use PackageURL for this.

I checked the SPDX spec and there is something we could use, but it’s a bit ugly:

https://spdx.github.io/spdx-spec/v2.3/external-repository-identifiers/

So, the appropriate SPDX tag would therefore be e.g.:

SPDX-ExternalRef: PACKAGE-MANAGER purl pkg:github/fsfe/reuse-docs

If we can find a better solution, I’m all ears. Reopening.