Hello, everyone.

I  was  surprised  by such warm debate in consequence of a simple
question.  I did some digging, and  found  that  we're  all  both
right and wrong with respect to several different aspects.

A  major  cause of confusion was my packing of copyright notices,
license terms and disclaimer information in a single  bag.   Each
has  its own issues, so that performing translations on them have
different levels of impact on rights we have and business we  do.
This  first  mistake brought in argument, which brought some rea-
soning, but also some misconceptions.

I  want  to  share the impressions and suggestions (and doubts) I
got after some searching.  I tried to look at serious places, but
I am still no lawyer and I have not directly read the text of any
law, so I can perfectly be wrong or dealing with outdated  infor-
mation.

> Paulo Alexandre Pinto Pires <p@ppires.org> writes:
> > On Tue, Feb 10, 2004 at 10:23:54AM -0500, Perry E. Metzger wrote:
> >> 
> >> Andy R <quadreverb@yahoo.com> writes:
> >> > Is there any reason why not to translate the
> >> > copyright?
> >>
> >> 1) The original is the legal license, not the translation.
> >> 2) Unless the translator is a specialist in translating legal
> >>    paperwork, they'll get terminology wrong.
> >> 3) The original is the legal license, not the translation.
> >
> > Your restating makes me think you consider it very important, but
> > I don't really understand what you _mean_.  The copyright is not
> > strictly a license, is it?
> 
> It is. What we call the "copyright" is in fact a license -- the
> "copyright" itself is just an abstract notion, represented by the
> words "Copyright 2004 The NetBSD Foundation, Inc."

Technically,  we cannot translate a "copyright", since it doesn't
make sense to translate one's _right_ to copy.  However,  we  can
translate a copyright notice or statement.

NetBSD   website   conveniently  links  to  the  "Copyright  FAQ"
(<http://www.faqs.org/faqs/law/copyright/faq/>).  Section 2.7  of
the  FAQ ("What advantages are there to including a copyright no-
tice on my work?") clearly states that no such notice  is  neces-
sary  for  the purpose of ensuring an author's rights on his work
(though it used to be necessary in the U.S.  before   1998/03/01,
when they adhered to the Berne Convention).  However, a copyright
notice is still valuable for the sole purpose of preventing some-
one  who  infringed  copyright  to 'plead "innocent infringement"
(...) in mitigation of actual or statutory damages'.

Since  the  purpose  is making sure that others really understand
that they are liable for any infringement, it makes sense  to  me
that for material in language X for X language readers, the copy-
right notice should look as clear and unambiguous to those  read-
ers  as  possible, and this surely includes the language in which
that notice is written.

However,  there is a strict format in which that notice shall be.
According to 17 U.S.C. 401(b), it is composed of three parts:

    1) the "C-in-a-circle" (the copyright symbol)  _or_  the word
       "Copyright" _or_ the abbreviation "Copr.",

    2) the year when the work was first published,

    3) the name of the copyright owner.

In particular, the phrase "ALL RIGHTS RESERVED", which is the on-
ly thing that makes sense to translate, is not a mandated part of
the  notice.   In fact, in every page in htdocs, it is a separate
sentence.  According to section 3.10 in the Copyright  FAQ,  this
phrase  remains  from the Buenos Aires Convention on Literary and
Artistic Copyrights for countries in the Americas,  which  is  an
almost  defunct  treaty,  obsoleted by the Berne Convention.  Its
conclusion about it is "It lives on mostly as a testament to  in-
ertia on the part of U.S. publishers".

Regarding  translation  of such phrase, I must say, as a national
citizen of another country in the Americas, which is a  signatory
to  the  Buenos  Aires Convention, that, for both locally written
and for translated books published here  in  Portuguese,  I  have
never seen the "ALL RIGHTS RESERVED" phrase untranslated.  I also
checked many major websites (that  is,  those  whose  owners  are
mostly  likely  to sue you if you "borrow" contents from them) in
the country, including those from groups like  Yahoo!,  which  is
subject to a company based in the U.S., and Hotmail, which is al-
so _hosted_ in the U.S., and nowhere have I seen any such  infor-
mation that was not in Portguese.

> > Besides, the most important point in
> > any license or copyright information is (IMO) to make it perfectly
> > clear to the user/reader/victim what rights he has,
> 
> No. That's not true at all. The law is not about making things
> perfectly clear to the reader. The law is about making things legally
> enforceable by lawyers. The two have no relationship whatsoever.

A  license  is  not the law.   The law is what one can use to en-
force (or invalidate) a license and  its  terms.   A  license  is
about the licenser telling the licensee "you agree before the law
to obey this license; if you fail to do so, I will  use  the  law
against  you".   In order to enforce a license, the licenser must
be careful to write a license that is compliant to the law;  oth-
erwise, anyone that could prove it to be invalid would be able to
circumvent it.  That's where lawyers come in.

> Lets say you sign a contract that has language about "waiving your
> right of subrogation". You have no idea what subrogation is. Does the
> fact that you don't understand that phrase make the contract any less
> enforceable? Not in the least. Does the fact that no one outside of
> the legal profession uses the word make the contract less enforceable?

What  makes contracts complicated is the fact that they are writ-
ten by lawyers, using the terms they  are  familiar  with,  which
they probably (and most likely correctly) believe to express what
they want to say in the best way before the  law.   That's  their
job and I have no problem with that.  However, everyone is gener-
ally able to read a contract (or the  20000+-word  EULA  that  is
shown as soon as he closes his CD drive tray with his new program
installation) before signing it.  If he  doesn't  understand  one
term  or  the  other, he can go to the dictionary and look it up.
He can also always hire an attorney to read it and tell  sign  to
sign or not.

> Of course not. Would any lawyer hesitate for a second to put words
> like that into a contract simply because normal people have no idea
> what they mean? No lawyer would hesitate for a moment.

I  don't  believe  they  do that to intentionally deceive people.
Law in general (especially and increasingly in recent days) seems
to  be  written on the presumption that it will always be used by
law professionals, only.  That's too bad, especially because  one
of  the fundamental principles in every country is that any citi-
zen will be judged as if he knew all the laws he  is  subject  to
(and even those he wouldn't be subject to).

I believe this is sort of a chicken-and-egg problem.  I have many
friends who are lawyers, and sometimes we talk about  some  legal
aspects  of different subjects.  They simply cannot tell anything
about it without eructing heavy legalese.   I  believe  they  are
trained to do so in college, and that's some part of their learn-
ing which they all become very proficient with.

This  is one more reason why I think it is important that we _do_
translate legal material related to NetBSD and the  works  behind
and beneath it.  Our community should have the right to have sim-
ple descriptions of what their rights, obligations and warranties
are  and what are not, even in English.  Documents providing such
information  could  have  a   disclaimer  note  like   that    of
<http://www.NetBSD.org/Goals/redistribution.html#copyright-info>
or that of the Copyright FAQ, stating that they are  informative,
only, and not an authoritative source of legal advice.

> > Wrong terminology can certainly be a problem, but the writers/coders
> > in our community, who produce original texts and source code (including
> > their copyright/license/disclaimers notes), are most likely not law
> > experts in their language/country, either, so it is very likely that
> > some of our current practices can be wrong from the very beginning.
> 
> The official grant of rights is the version written in English by
> lawyers. (Yes, it was not written by programmers.) It should not be
> tampered with without advice from lawyers, and translation (other than
> unofficial translation) is a form of tampering.

What  grant of what rights on what?  If the reference was to BSD-
style licenses in the source code, I have looked at a  number  of
files  and  saw that different files had different sets of condi-
tions in their license terms (although mostly  subsets  or  small
variations  of the BSD license).  What remained more constant ac-
cross different files was the disclaimer note.

Other  than  the optional copyright information, I cannot contem-
plate a grant of license to the website.  Its disclaimer informa-
tion,  as  found in <http://www.NetBSD.org/Misc/disclaimer.html>,
is very loose, almost informal.  I don't think that it was  writ-
ten by a lawyer, and I don't see how it could be tampered with if
translated, unless the  translator  intentionally  subverted  its
meaning completly.

> > Writers and translators of what is in htdocs are not generally emp-
> > loyees of The NetBSD Foundation, but give it not only the copyright
> > but also full rights reservation on material they contribute.
> 
> That's because they generally sign a copyright assignment form.

I was not presented anything like that when I volunteered to per-
form translations to Portuguese, nor could I find any such infor-
mation  anywhere in the website or in htdocs files.  Possibly, no
such assignment is required from  translators,  because  I  don't
think  any of us would be dumb enough to claim copyright on mate-
rial we simply  translated,  for  which  originals  are  publicly
available, with very clear copyright statements.

Best regards,
-- 
	Pappires

... Qui habet aurem audiat quid Spiritus dicat ecclesiis.