where do I include the copyright notice of someone else's work in my website?

Question

My website contains : 1.FancyBox (for image overlay) 2.GalleryView (a slider) and both use JQuery.

They are both free to use, but they insist on their copyright message shown where the work is used. I'm confused as to where I must show the message. license message of GalleryView. (Both Fancybox and this are under MIT license I suppose)

Copyright (c) 2009 John Anderson III

Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy
of this software and associated documentation files (the "Software"), to deal
in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights
to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell
copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the Software is
furnished to do so, subject to the following conditions:

The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in
all copies or substantial portions of the Software.

THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED "AS IS", WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR
IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY,
FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE
AUTHORS OR COPYRIGHT HOLDERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER
LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM,
OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS IN
THE SOFTWARE.

Where am I to show it in my website? And should I show a separate message for JQuery which I don't directly use?

Solution

Let us take a look as developers:

My website contains: 1.FancyBox (for image overlay) 2.GalleryView (a slider) and both use JQuery.

So to speak, if a user visits your website, you offer some software to download. When the user decides to download the software (activate scripts), you provide a copy of the following software:

1. JQuery - According to the website it is MIT or GPL.
2. FancyBox - Refers to the same: MIT or GPL.
3. GalleryView - According to it's LICENSE.txt file, this is MIT

---

Note: 3. contains third party code with different authors and licenses, mainly BSD-3-Clause as far as I could see, but I did not looked further. I'd say, if you have professional interest in using that library contact the author of that library, ask to correct the licensing information. Permissive licenses like BSD-3-Clause have requirements that need to be matched to gain usage rights. Just saying, I'd say it's common, so nothing to worry, just to take care of.

---

As one can see with this listing - and ignoring the problems in 3. for a moment - all software is available under free software license, so as you wrote, they are free to use.

But as you have worded it, they "insist on their copyright message shown where the work is used.". Let's pick that part from the BSD-3-Clause license text:

Redistributions of source code must retain the above copyright notice, this list of conditions and the following disclaimer.

And from the MIT license text:

The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.

I think this is both pretty clear: When you pass along the software, you should pass along author credits / copyright / the usage terms / license.

Depending on how you deliver the software, you can put these terms inside the source-code and deliver it with the javascript files directly.

If you create binary version of the software (e.g. pack/compress the software), those comments then might be removed. You are still able to add those again on top of the file.

jQuery is pretty generous here btw, for example for the files that are delivered by nobody less than Google Inc., You find this:

https://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/1.7.2/jquery.min.js

/*! jQuery v1.7.2 jquery.com | jquery.org/license */
(function(a,b){function cy(a) ...

So Google gives "Credit" by saying what software that file is (jQuery v1.7.2), from where they obtained it from (jquery.com) and they provide the licensing information (jquery.org/license). Legally this might not be enough if you talk with your lawyer, however, in this case I assume this is an accepted procedure by the jQuery project.

But this does not mean that this would be okay for John Anderson III, George McGinley Smith, and Robert Penner (and perhaps Blair Mitchelmore). The later btw. uses the WTFPL License which is considered a joke. It normally is not accepted and raises needless questions, so again, the author who packages up 3. should probably do same as the cloudstack folks did.

A Webmistress' Conclusion

That software we normally link in <script> tags in <head> (and less often <body>) is best distributed packed to spare us needless traffic. That means the source-form of the file is altered and often the comments containing the copyright and licensing information is missing. But often these licenses require us to provide that information.

It looks promising to just make use of another semantic HTML feature to provide copyright information: The copyright link you can place into the head next to script tags:

<link href="contact.html#credits" rel="copyright" title="Licensing Information">

or for the ones of us in the HTML 5 camp:

<link href="contact.html#credits" rel="license" title="Licensing Information">

This is an example providing another hyptertext markup language document that lists the used software and gives its licensing information in human readable form (compare). Please consult the HTML reference of your choice to learn more about the <link> tag.

Hope this is helpful. I don't want to prevent you to go to a lawyer to further clarify this, however, your lawyer might not even add more to this: Credits page, provide license information and a link to that page from every page that links as well the software. What can one want more? And I bet, if you do this, you are one of the more good citizens out there.

IANAL just a software developer, so thank you for asking for feedback, I could have been one of those other developers and naturally I prefer it if somebody asks instead of not doing anything. I would say as a developer: The most important thing is that users of my software learn about the rights they have with the software they use. Thank you for asking how to make that possible!

Comments

[batman]

Legal,yes, but it something other web developers would have gone through.

[whiskeySteve]

Yes, but the license agreement is ambiguous, which is why your safest bet is to contact the copyright holder. I know we aren't dealing with major intellectual property here, but technically you can't give legal advice without a JD. :) Also, the community prefers coding questions; this is sort of off-topic.

[batman]

Thank You :) It is under the MIT license. Isn't that a very standard one? Hope I'm not being naive. :)

[hakre]

New version of link? issues.apache.org/jira/browse/LEGAL-135