Copyright Infringement and abuse updates

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Dear OpenDesktop Team. This member @vinceliuice abuse updates and infringes copyright.
He post Papirus Dev Team work as his and doesn’t mention about that!
Please deal with this.

I’m warned about abuse earlier. But this happened again and again.

He clone my KDE Themes and modify. BUT REMOVE MY NAME FROM AUTHORS:

Now he copy/paste all tray icons from Papirus to Tella - and post new release:

https://raw.githubusercontent.com/vinceliuice/Tela-icon-theme/master/src/22/panel/audacious-panel.svg
https://raw.githubusercontent.com/PapirusDevelopmentTeam/papirus-icon-theme/master/Papirus/22x22/panel/audacious-panel.svg

It’s freeloader and copyright Infringement.

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@opendesktop How you think, if member copy/paste more700-tray icons * 3 (16px/22px/24px) = more 2100 icons really and NOT write about original AUTHORS - it’s copyright Infringement?
If he thrice forgets about, it’s respect for us?

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Your jobs are in GPL and this license allows you to eliminate credits by being 100% free.

That is why I opted for the CC BY-SA so that all the forks give me credits for being based on my work.

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You think product licensing with GPLv3 not have copyright and authors?
file AUTHORS on every my work it’s only useless file?
You can use my work anytime and anywhere, BUT it does not deprive copyright.
When using someone else’s work, you MUST mention this regardless of license.

1 Like
6

Well, unfortunately, the GPL does not force you to do so, it is a matter of the moral of each developer.

The GPL is a great license for many sections, but in the artistic sector CC BY-SA is better to maintain your legacy even if there are forks of it.

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I second this and additionally to klorax’s pointers to the FAQ will post these snippets right from the GPLv3 license. v3 is the latest version so I’ll refer to that. Remember that GPL requires to redistribute with the same GPL. You legally can not change a program licensed with GPL to any other license even when redistributing. But this is not the concern of this thread. So let’s dig in:

Snippet from Preamble:

For the developers’ and authors’ protection, the GPL clearly explains
that there is no warranty for this free software. For both users’ and
authors’ sake, the GPL requires that modified versions be marked as
changed, so that their problems will not be attributed erroneously to
authors of previous versions.

This paragraph makes it very clear that you should at the very least make it apparent in the documentation that your modified version “be marked as changed”.

GPLv3 also makes your responsibilities clear when redistributing without changing anything in 4. Conveying Verbatim Copies:

You may convey verbatim copies of the Program’s source code as you
receive it, in any medium, provided that you conspicuously and
appropriately publish on each copy an appropriate copyright notice;
keep intact all notices stating that this License and any
non-permissive terms added in accord with section 7 apply to the code;
keep intact all notices of the absence of any warranty; and give all
recipients a copy of this License along with the Program.

This is pretty straight forward and from my understanding is the legal reasoning for the FAQ sections pointed out by klorax.

Modified code is covered additionally by 5. Conveying Modified Source Versions:

You may convey a work based on the Program, or the modifications to
produce it from the Program, in the form of source code under the
terms of section 4, provided that you also meet all of these conditions:

a) The work must carry prominent notices stating that you modified
it, and giving a relevant date.

b) The work must carry prominent notices stating that it is
released under this License and any conditions added under section
7. This requirement modifies the requirement in section 4 to
“keep intact all notices”.
[…]

Of special interest is mostly 5. a) here.

So you already know that any copyright notice made in the license must be carried over. Additionally comes in Section 7. Additional Terms:

Notwithstanding any other provision of this License, for material you
add to a covered work, you may (if authorized by the copyright holders of
that material) supplement the terms of this License with terms:
[…]
b) Requiring preservation of specified reasonable legal notices or
author attributions in that material or in the Appropriate Legal
Notices displayed by works containing it; or

c) Prohibiting misrepresentation of the origin of that material, or
requiring that modified versions of such material be marked in
reasonable ways as different from the original version; or
[…]

There are six pre-defined optional “supplements” to GPLv3. The two shown here are the ones commonly of most interest. c) is rather similar to the above paragraph but with different wording and slightly different intention. b) is what most people would want to look for.

Since these are optional you need to make sure that you include this term or an indicating notice pointing to them in every source file that you want to license. This is usually achieved by the typical copyright notice when stating: “You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License along with [PROGRAM]. If not, see Licenses - GNU Project - Free Software Foundation”. We all know this sentence very well. The following is the legal portion referring to this sentence:

If you add terms to a covered work in accord with this section, you
must place, in the relevant source files, a statement of the
additional terms that apply to those files, or a notice indicating
where to find the applicable terms.

Also of noticeable mentioning is this term:

All other non-permissive additional terms are considered “further
restrictions” within the meaning of section 10. If the Program as you
received it, or any part of it, contains a notice stating that it is
governed by this License along with a term that is a further
restriction, you may remove that term.

This is a complex form of saying: whatever other nonsense you might write into the licensing terms or a separate license along with GPL is legally not applicable to the program licensed under GPL.

9. Acceptance Not Required for Having Copies:

You are not required to accept this License in order to receive or
run a copy of the Program. […] However,
nothing other than this License grants you permission to propagate or
modify any covered work. These actions infringe copyright if you do
not accept this License. Therefore, by modifying or propagating a
covered work, you indicate your acceptance of this License to do so.

This is to say that you legally bind to these terms when propagating or modifying the work licensed under this license and therefore fulfill the above stated requirements when doing so.

CONCLUSION:

YES you HAVE TO keep copyright notices in GPLv3.

I have written several times already about this issue on opendesktop. Everybody knows this is a ridiculous discussion. Those who ignore common sense will not change their mind by pointing out digital licenses. Only the @opendesktop team can try to moderate this. And each and every one of us is free to adhere to their model or not. That being said I hope this gets even more attention by the team in the future.
Personally I have given up. I just don’t care anymore. It is NOT WORTH MY TIME to try to fight people who want to make a quick penny and successfully do so, some of them even generating quite some money. I DON’T CARE. I will still care for merge requests and comments/user requests to my products pushing updates but I’ll definitely not try to gain some income for very quality work through this platform until something changes on this matter. I’ll still be a recurring donator giving back some of that money but I’m contributing with my favorite Linux distro in my free time and will focus on my life instead.

3 Likes
9

Thx @marianarlt for your detailed explanation.
I understand OpenDesktop Team cannot track thousands products and their clones, conduct an audit and find out who the author is, who violates the license or copyrights, etc. But respect for product members must be rigorous.
Here the principle of morality and dignity plays a big role.

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By the way GPL makes no distinction between actual written code or other digital content (even though I’d argue that GPL is not the greatest for media like video/image/illustration:

Here’s a supplement I came up with which I think might be added to the copyright/license notice. The following is a complete usable notice based on the official GPL guide How to use GNU licenses for your own software. I take no responsibility whatsoever if you use this. You don’t have to word your notice like this. It’s the suggestion by the GPL team with my personal addition.
I put the supplement before the paragraph about warranty. It is not required to add something like this (I refer to the non-standard paragraph referencing specific sections) to claim all the above. It is only a legally legitimate way of emphasizing what was discussed earlier:

This file is part of [PROGRAM], [DESCRIPTION-OF-PROGRAM].

Copyright (C) [YEAR] [AUTHOR]

[PROGRAM] is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify
it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by
the Free Software Foundation, either version 3 of the License, or
(at your option) any later version.

You are required to preserve this and any additional notices, either
contained in this file or in other files that you received along with
[PROGRAM], that refer to the author(s) in accordance with
sections §4, §5 and especially §7b of the GNU General Public License.

[PROGRAM] is distributed in the hope that it will be useful,
but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of
MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the
GNU General Public License for more details.

You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License
along with [PROGRAM]. If not, see https://www.gnu.org/licenses/.

You need to understand that this and similar notices that we find so often in source files of programs are not the License itself but rather are “legal notices” protected from removal by the GNU General Public License in §7b.

This is only my legal interpretation of the GNU General Public License terms. I am no Lawyer. I do not take responsibility for any of the given advice.

1 Like
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Ok I understand that, but if I fork an item in GPL and publish it under the same license, am I required to mention the original author?

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The short (or very long) answer is: Read both my posts again and thoroughly.

Long answer:
You are not required to mention the author by yourself if there was NO legal notice or AUTHORS file or similar mentioning included when you received the work.

If this is still not clear to some: If an author appears in a file as a legal notice, GPL requires you to keep it. This is most commonly expressed in the legal notice as “Copyright [year] [name]”. - GNU General Public License §7b

Whether or not the AUTHORS file should be considered a legal notice in itself is very questionable. Hence my advise to include it explicitly in the written legal notice of the program. The written legal notice can also appear in your COPYING file (GNU suggested License file name) anywhere not between the terms of the License itself. This is actually what is suggested by GPL by default as mentioned in How to use GNU licenses for your own software.

Also I feel this is very important to say based on the last question (although I already mentioned it in the first post I made in this thread…):
You must not redistribute a GPL licensed work under a different License or different terms except a higher version GPL! This is a crucial part of this License.

Even if you include a GPL licensed work in a newly created one which is to be published under a different License you have to include all the existing GPL licensing terms and legal notices based on the explained terms for that specific part that now becomes a redistributed part inside of a new program (which is exactly why it’s sometimes not used to begin with—say you anticipate your program to be something of such modular nature that you expect it to be included in other software).

1 Like
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Thank you for responding, so according to what I have read, the GPL license is not appropriate for licensing artworks.

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While that’s an opinion and personally I’d also say that, please be aware of what I mentioned earlier:
GPL does not make that difference. So if anybody chose to publish media of any form under GPL terms those terms are then to be respected.
It’s also a good idea to read up on CC though if you plan on using that a lot. It’s simply always good to know what you can and can not claim.

1 Like