Re: [libreplanet-discuss] Fwd: The FSF Allows No Derivatives

[Joshua Gay]

On 05/16/2015 01:44 AM, Aaron Wolf wrote:
> But this is all tangential. You and others have failed to provide any
> reasonable justification for RMS' use of ND other than an ill-founded
> claim that it actually helps avoid misrepresentation. I've pointed out
> that misrepresentation is possible regardless and that CC has a clause
> that requires modified versions to be marked as modified. Furthermore,
> plagiarism and misrepresentation are fraudulent regardless of copyright law.

A statement in a licensing clause that states: "this work has been
extremely accurately translated from the original French of the author
into English", I believe, would suffice to comply with CC BY 4.0
condition that you must "indicate if changes were made."

So imagine if someone used that sort of statement for a CC BY version of
an RMS essay but in the work they created they translated the term "free
software" in one language to the phrase "open source software" in
another. I think it would be fair to say that this is a
misrepresentation of RMS's original work  (not just the ideas) because
it would not be accurate to call it an extremely accurate translation,
even if in doing so one complies with the license.

Anyhow, that is just a hypothetical example in response to what you said
to show that I think one can produce a misrepresention of an author's
work and comply with the terms of a CC BY license.

Personally, I don't find the use of ND licenses to be an injustice when
applied to non-software works. If I did find it an injustice, I would
not work for the FSF. I do, however, prefer that my works carry to
everyone the freedoms to modify and redistribute modifications. That is,
I think the benefit of encouraging this sort of activity outweighs the
risk of an author's work being misrepresented.

-- 
Joshua Gay
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