Copyright uncertainties of Celestia

[zoop]

Hi, Celestia developers!

I'm the new maintainer of Celestia for the Debian Project.

On 2003-09-01 I have sent an email to celestia-developers@lists.sourceforge.net about the copyright uncertainties that celestia undoubtedly has. I so far have not received any feedback and thus I'm posting here.

I won't post all the details here, if you are interested check out the bug report here: http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=174456
and the thread on debian-legal, here: http://lists.debian.org/debian-legal/20 ... 00012.html

If anyone is interested in resolving these issues please reply here or contact me at: <mf (at) debian.org>.

If you have further questions (after reading the links!) please ask here, I'll try to explain then.

Thanks in advance,
Mika

[meegja]

Hi there
I think NASA is all okay. I mean, they even have parts about Celestia on the NASA sites themselfs ....
For example on http://learn.arc.nasa.gov/exp/part1/index.html and http://learn.arc.nasa.gov/exp/index.html ....
Seems to me that IF there were any copyright issues, NASA would not have Celestia mentioned at all?

[Guest]

Hi!

Hi there
I think NASA is all okay. I mean, they even have parts about Celestia on the NASA sites themselfs ....
Seems to me that IF there were any copyright issues, NASA would not have Celestia mentioned at all?

While you are probably right that stuff made by NASA is free of copyright issues because it is most probably in the public domain, particularly the stuff done by the JPL (which is also a part of CalTech) is obviously not OK.

JPL images are available for use by the public free of charge. However,
by electing to download images from this web site the user agrees that
Caltech makes no warranties or representations with respect to its
ownership of copyrights for the images, does not represent others who
may claim to be owners of rights in the images, and makes no warranties
as to the quality of the images.

Commercial users (excluding journalistic uses) are required to copy the
JPL Image Release document and return a signed copy to the Caltech's
Intellectual Property Counsel, California Institute of Technology M/C
201-85, Pasadena, California 91125, who will countersign document and
return a copy to you. Copies may be faxed to (626) 577-2528. This
document will become effective when it is countersigned by Caltech.

This means that they do not even guarantee that they own the copyright to the images. So the distributor of these images could be subjeted to litigation by the copyright holder for infringement of his copyright.
Furthermore the non-commercial clause is at least problematic for Debian since we do not include software which cannot be used in commercial environments.

My analysis of the current situation can be found at http://people.debian.org/~mf/celestia/license/

The very least that should be done is to state explicitly in a seperate file which artwork came from which person or organization and under what terms it may be used.
I realize that this is not a trivial task but I'm willing to help you out here provided that this approach is supported by the Celestia developers.

Thanks,
Mika