Licensing of translations (problem!)

[Jeroen Vermeulen]

Peter Clifton wrote:

> Or, does launchpad choose to declare a translation as BSD licensed,
> launchpad contributed, if it finds the same string / translation in the
> upstream upload and already in Launchpad as BSD? If that were the case,
> I guess over time, strings which are accidentally the same in both end
> up being migrated to BSD licensed equivelants from launchpad.

Just a small note on this last bit: where strings can be accidentally 
the same, as far as I'm aware, copyright simply does not apply.  The 
first person in the world to say "have you seen Jack's new blog entry?" 
did not get any special rights to that sentence.  (I don't suppose Jack 
did, either).  The sentence can be in a GPL'ed program, and it can be 
copied from there into a proprietary commercial program and nobody needs 
to license it to anyone.

I asked one legal person: what's a reasonable minimum text size to start 
talking about copyright?  I'm not even telling you which jurisdiction 
this was because I don't want people to take this as solid legal advice, 
but his answer was "half a side of A4."  IANAL, YMMV, etc.  AIUI there 
are also usually scenes-a-faire clauses that exclude material where you 
can't reasonably express something very differently than somebody else 
already has.  So let's not get too hung up on the licensing of an 
individual string, or strings that are identical between programs, 
because it's probably meaningless!


Jeroen