[Harmony-Drafting] Licensing the agreements

[Smith, McCoy]

For what it's worth, Creative Commons does not assert copyright on their license text but does say you cannot alter the licenses and call them "Creative Commons";  it looks like they might enforce that via trademark but it's not clear from the info page:
http://creativecommons.org/policies


From: harmony-drafting-bounces at lists.harmonyagreements.org [mailto:harmony-drafting-bounces at lists.harmonyagreements.org] On Behalf Of Radcliffe, Mark
Sent: Thursday, June 09, 2011 10:25 AM
To: harmony-drafting at lists.harmonyagreements.org
Subject: Re: [Harmony-Drafting] Licensing the agreements

I have been traveling and I am catching up on the thread. Sorry for any confusion through the use of verbatim, we clearly want the projects to choose one of the options.

However, Neil is correct that the purpose of Project Harmony was to create "standard" documents which would minimize differences between contribution agreements from different projects and the drafts were meant to used without changes: we included the variables to address the different models for different projects. We want to reduce review time and minimize transaction costs such as legal review.  On the international side, the intention is to either port or assist others to port the agreements to other jurisdictions, but to meet the "standardization goals" set forth above we would want to have an "approved version" for a jurisdiction.

However, if projects wish to modify the documents, they can do so, but they need to make clear to users that they have modified the agreements and, thus,  will lose the advantage of a "standard" documents. Thus, to meet this goal, a document which is modified beyond the options permitted in Harmony draft agreements should be clearly labeled as not a "Harmony" contributor agreement. I think that the use of terms such as "Harmony family" or similar terms does not meet this goal. Thus, we recommend that the users of such modified contribution agreement should expressly state that although based on Harmony, the contribution agreement has been modified.

I will work on incorporating the comments of the various parties.


-----Original Message-----
From: harmony-drafting-bounces at lists.harmonyagreements.org [mailto:harmony-drafting-bounces at lists.harmonyagreements.org] On Behalf Of Allison Randal
Sent: Wednesday, June 08, 2011 10:09 AM
To: harmony-drafting at lists.harmonyagreements.org
Subject: Re: [Harmony-Drafting] Licensing the agreements

On 06/08/2011 09:50 AM, Walter van Holst wrote:
>
> To my understanding of the discussions, it has always been te intent to
> narrow the number of variations down as much as possible. That
> notwithstanding, I would not be in favour of a "verbatim copying"
> license. Just using one of the optional clauses would be a non-verbatim
> copy and nonetheless completely within the scope of the intended use.
> Likewise, porting of the agreements should be possible as well,
> otherwise many projects that have chosen different jurisdictions as
> their jurisdiction of incorporation are less likely to benefit from our
> efforts.

Completely agreed that verbatim copying doesn't work for Harmony,
because *every* use of Harmony is a generation from a template. And also
that we're happy with more general modifications as well. The key
question is whether we can make a clear distinction between "choosing
options" and "general modifications". This distinction makes it easier
for developers and lawyers using and reviewing agreements to know if
they're dealing with the standard set of options they've reviewed or
signed a dozen times before, or something completely new that's just
derived from the Harmony templates.

Allison
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