[theme-reviewers] explicit license statements for binaries

[Chip Bennett]

That would be true, were it not for the all-too-often occurrences of
non-GPL-compatible resources being bundled with Themes.

And, yes: it's a technicality. But it's a technicality imposed on us by
WPORG policy stating that hosted Themes must be 100% GPL-compatible.

I think the whole theme itself should be considered an individual "work"
and when you use a public domain image (as I do) the entire thing becomes a
a new work and can retain a GPL copyright as a whole.


Except that's not true. You have every right to license the *compilation*
under GPL, but you still can't claim (or imply) that you hold the copyright
for the PD work itself, or that the PD work itself is licensed under GPL.
It does suck sometimes, but these things DO matter.

I don't think there should be any assumptions made


I agree, which is why explicit declaration of copyright and licensing is
important for bundled resources.

Chip

On Fri, Feb 10, 2012 at 11:26 AM, Angelo Bertolli <angelo.bertolli at gmail.com
> wrote:

> I think we're losing sight of what the intention of the GPL on the themes
> are... to be able to modify and reuse or redistribute the theme.  I don't
> think it's really all that important to get so nit picky about each item
> within the theme on its own license, except as a technicality.
>
> I think the whole theme itself should be considered an individual "work"
> and when you use a public domain image (as I do) the entire thing becomes a
> a new work and can retain a GPL copyright as a whole.  While this doesn't
> prevent someone who knows the image is public domain from re-using that
> image however they want, I don't think there should be any assumptions made.
>
>
>
> On 2/10/2012 12:09 PM, Bruce Wampler wrote:
>
>> What about images that use public domain images as a source?
>>
>> First, if a theme uses public domain images, it is not very clear from
>> copyright law that there needs to be any attribution of that fact when
>> they are used, or that they are even subject to any licensing.
>>
>> I personally have built quite a collection of public domain images - and
>> over time have likely lost track of the download source. But even then,
>> what is that worth? Whatever source I used most likely collected the
>> images from some other public domain source. So the statement that some
>> images are public domain should be enough because that statement is as
>> trustworthy as any up the download chain.
>>
>> Second, it is pretty clear that modified public domain images can in
>> fact be copyrighted. Thus, covering original images, images created from
>> public domain sources, or "original" public domain sources should all be
>> treated equally - covered under the GPL compatible license used by the
>> theme. (Modified versions of copyrighted images cannot be used without
>> being covered by a GPL-compatible license which would require the
>> appropriate links to the original.)
>>
>> It doesn't seem to me that it should be up to the WPTRT to become
>> lawyers or police and try to interpret and enforce copyright law. It
>> seems to me that the overwhelming majority of theme authors do their
>> best to follow copyright/licensing law. I personally have been extremely
>> careful about the sources of my images (and other code snippets).
>>
>> So for my theme, which does include a number of header images and icons
>> of both original work and modified public domain work, I believe that
>> they are all covered by the main GPL license.
>>
>> And as a secondary issue - what about GPL compatible scripts? It seems
>> many themes include JavaScripts that include their own licenses included
>> in their own sub-directory. Should it be required that a reference to
>> each such library be included in the readme.txt? What about PHP code
>> snippets used from some GPL compatible source - it seems to be common
>> practice to use these with proper attribution at the head of the
>> snippet. Just how deep does one need to go in the readme.txt file.
>> Perhaps nothing, or maybe a statement: Some scripts and code fragments
>> include licenses in their respective sub-directories. One could even
>> extend this to the actual base code of the theme, which very frequently
>> started with one of the default WP themes, or another GPL theme. For
>> example, I'm not sure that the statements in my own license file (and
>> those of many other themes in the repository) would meet the technical
>> GPL requirements of referring back to the original Twenty Eleven source
>> code it was derived from, yet that seems to have been treated as
>> acceptable practice for a long time.
>>
>> If the subject of tightening up licensing requirements is opened up, I
>> just think it is important to look at everything.
>>
>>
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