[cc-licenses] Is BY-ND a good choice for an Internet XML-based protocol specification?

Luis Villa luis at tieguy.org
Wed Jan 24 16:24:41 EST 2007


On 1/24/07, Lucas Gonze <lucas.gonze at gmail.com> wrote:
> In any event, thanks to James Grimmelmann for the legal expertise.
> I'm happy to learn that things are working, even if it is by accident.
>  :)  (Though I am sorry that the ND clause is not going to help with
> interoperability).

FWIW, Lucas, the route most large free-ish projects seem to be going
is to use TM for interoperability protection- abuse the spec all you
want, but if your product doesn't conform, you can't it _______(tm)-
compliant.

Doing this really well requires creating a conformance test, and it
rankles certain free software people (including myself.) But as far as
I can see it seems like the least of the various evils.

I'm not sure the approach has ever been tested, but it seems sound
given the information-quality goals of trademark law.

Luis



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