>However, there seem to me to be a few obvious caveats: >* I would not want to be blamed for bad advice someone else added to > mine; thus I would want modifications to be indicated; This is just fine and DFSG-free.
>* I would not want someone else to change my biography provided in the > "About the Author" section. This is *not* OK; it means, quite simply, that the biography is not DFSG-free. If you require that the biography be included with any derivative work, that renders the whole work not DFSG-free. (If you allow your biography to be *removed* from derivative works, then DFSG-free derivative works can be made by removing the non-DFSG-free biography.) But this isn't what you really care about, is it? Editors change author's biography texts fairly often. The author of a derivative work might want to add that you'd won the Nobel Prize (if you had done so after the original work's publication), and what's wrong with that? Really, what you want is to prevent an *inaccurate* biography from being put in, right? Or perhaps to prevent an altered version of the biography from being presented as your version? For the second purpose, that's what attribution requirements and ChangeLog requirements are for. For the first purpose, I believe a clause like the following would be just fine: "As a condition of distributing a modified version of the Biography, you must in good faith believe that all your modifications are accurate, and you must prominently note that you wrote the modified version and I didn't." >* The Paramedic Free Press Association would not want the colophon > information that is no longer true to be retained in a modified > version. (E.g., if part of the colophon says "This book was written > in its entirety using Emacs/psgml on a PowerMac 7100 running Debian > GNU/Linux 3.0 (Woody), and is valid against the DocBook XML 3.2 > DTD.", but the modifications were not written on that system nor is > the result valid against DocBook 3.2.) This is OK provided it's written narrowly enough -- but it usually isn't. The thing is, it should be OK to write "The original book from which this was derived was written in its entirety using Emacs/psgml on a PowerMac 7100 running Debian GNU/Linux 3.0 (Woody), and is valid against the DocBook XML 3.2 DTD." That sentence is obviously a derivative of the original sentence and probably subject to its copyright. If your license prohibits writing this, you've messed up and your license is not DFSG-free. It should also be OK to use the sentence unmodified *if* it's still true. This sort of stuff is really not the domain of copyright licenses. We encourage you to avoid imposing such non-copyright-related restrictions in copyright licenses, because it's error-prone. But if you must, you need to write the restrictions *very* carefully. For instance, I believe the following is OK: "As a condition of distributing this work or derivative works thereof, you must not include statements in the colophon unless you believe them to be true." Beginning to get the idea? :-)
