Bug#487218: games-thumbnails: unclear copyright concerns

[Jon Dowland]

Package: games-thumbnails
Version: 20080522
Severity: serious
Justification: Policy 2.1

Hi,

I'm sorry for the unpleasantness of this bug report :(

I don't think you can apply the BSD license to the
screenshots for all games. I think there is a compelling
argument that a thumbnailed screenshot is a derivative
work, and in some cases, the BSD license is not appropriate.

For example:

/usr/share/games/thumbnails/sauerbraten.png could be a
"derivative" of sauerbraten in contrib, or sauerbraten-data
in non-free, neither of which are BSD.

I think the best way forward might be to split the
games-thumbnails package up into games-thumbnails and
games-thumbnails-nonfree. Sauerbraten would be an example
of a screenshot to go into the latter package.

For stuff in the former, specific licenses per screenshot
may be necessary (e.g. a screenshot of GPL material is GPL
rather than BSD)

What do you think?

-- System Information:
Debian Release: lenny/sid
  APT prefers unstable
  APT policy: (500, 'unstable'), (500, 'stable'), (1, 'experimental')
Architecture: i386 (i686)

Kernel: Linux 2.6.25-2-686 (SMP w/2 CPU cores)
Locale: LANG=en_GB.UTF-8, LC_CTYPE=en_GB.UTF-8 (charmap=UTF-8)
Shell: /bin/sh linked to /bin/bash

-- no debconf information

-- 
Jon Dowland
ISS UNIX Team