[!CrackMonkey!] Contr-o-o-o-ol

[Rick Moen]

Quoting Mister Bad (mr.bad at pigdog.org):

> http://dmoz.org/license.html

I appreciate the link, but now I'm wondering where it's linked from.

When I visited the front page of http://dmoz.org/ , I looked around and
saw only the link from the phrase "terms of use" (bottom right), which
points to http://dmoz.org/termsofuse.html.  That has the personal,
non-commercial-use terms w/copyright assignment that I referred to
previously.

There is no link on the front page to http://dmoz.org/license.html .

http://dmoz.org/license.html claims that Netscape Communications Corp.
owns the copyright to the _compilation_ of the various contributions
(emphasis added), but the aforementioned ODP Terms of Use page claims 
Netscape gains -- inherent in your contribution -- not just a
compilation copyright, but copyright over the contribution itself.

http://dmoz.org/license.html _does_ purport to grant a quite liberal
licence to republish materials from dmoz.org, with or without
modification.  However, its initial sentence asserts, in effect, that 
other people own the content they submitted, and Netscape owns only a
compilation copyright (which is what the editor of a volume of
third-party short stories owns, for example).  

Further, this initial claim contradicts the one on
http://dmoz.org/termsofuse.html about copyright transfer -- not to
mention the one there about others' permission to republish.

They might want to work on getting their story straight.  Which
document, if any, applies?  If it's http://dmoz.org/license.html, then
what use is a permission grant that applies _only_ to Netscape's
compilation copyright, and not the constituent documents?  If it's 
http://dmoz.org/termsofuse.htm, then my earlier remarks apply.

-- 
Cheers,                                         kill -9 them all.               
Rick Moen                                       Let init sort it out.           
rick at linuxmafia.com