On Thu, 21 Oct 2004 15:35:49 +0100, Michael Sparks <michael.sparks@rd.bbc.co.uk> wrote:

On Thursday 21 Oct 2004 15:29, Mihai Ibanescu wrote:

...

Hello,

Here's an interesting bug:

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=136654

Hi Mihai,

That system requires a login in order to access that bug, and after registering I can't access the bug ("You are not authorized..."), and I doubt I'm alone in this. Could you elaborate further?

...

Is anyone aware of copyright issues on the Monty Python audio file?

Since Sourceforge is hosted in the US, I _suspect_ at minimum if the file is sufficiently small that it's covered by fair use there, and in many countries (also whilst UK copyright law doesn't have that concept unfortunately). If it isn't I'd be willing to try and get in contact with the appropriate people.

I'm not a lawyer though, nor able to grant permission if none hasn't already been, but I might be able to help *IF* there is an issue :)

I have the same problem (tried to register but still waiting for the password to arrive via email) so I can only guess what this bug report is about. If it's some random user worrying about copyrighted materials, please stop worrying. There are thousands of copies of the entire works of Monty Python on the web; even if M.P. were somehow to decide to send lawyers after each of those (which they don't), I still doubt that they would care about a single 3 second fragment in telephone quality. If we replaced it with a clip of *me* saying the same words I doubt that most people would be able to tell which clip was the original. But all that is irrelevant; only a lawyer's opinion counts. However, my judgement is that it's not worth it for the PSF to spend money to talk to a lawyer about; if someone already has a lawyer's opinion on this I'd like to hear it. Non-lawyer opinions are useless in this (even of lay-people who know a lot about the law) because it's not the legal expertise that makes it valuable, it's the fact that it's a lawyer who says it; what lawyers say (when wearing their lawyer hats) has special significance to the law (at least in the US). Let me promise you this: the second the PSF receives a cease-and-desist letter about this from John Cleese's lawyer, we'll remove it from the distribution. Until then, it stays. -- --Guido van Rossum (home page: http://www.python.org/~guido/)

Tim Peters wrote:

[Guido van Rossum]

...

... Let me promise you this: the second the PSF receives a cease-and-desist letter about this from John Cleese's lawyer, we'll remove it from the distribution. Until then, it stays.

Well, I'd be inclined to remove it if John just asks us to, even in the absence of legal threats. But without the threats, he'd have to ask nicely <wink>.

Especially if he asks by sending us a creative-commons licensed audio sample. "Hi, this is John Cleese, and I approve of this distribution" Sorry, getting political. --david

On Thu, Oct 21, 2004 at 03:35:49PM +0100, Michael Sparks wrote:

On Thursday 21 Oct 2004 15:29, Mihai Ibanescu wrote:

...

Hello,

Here's an interesting bug:

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=136654

Hi Mihai,

That system requires a login in order to access that bug, and after registering I can't access the bug ("You are not authorized..."), and I doubt I'm alone in this. Could you elaborate further?

Sorry folks, I am an idiot, I didn't notice the bug was marked as internal. I opened access to it, and for the ones who don't have accounts on bugzilla: <quote>

From an internal list:

Are we really allowed to ship: /usr/lib/python2.3/email/test/data/audiotest.au Thats a clip from monthy python, and its surely copyrighted. ... Might as well nuke it to be safe ; it's not like it's part of actual functionality AFAICT. </quote> The copyright owner (if there is one) would probably not care about PSF that much, because PSF is not commercial. But software vendors/packagers are probably at risk more than PSF is. Misa