Copyrights

["Scott E. Fahlman" <Fahlman@C.CS.CMU.EDU>]

I'm quite happy to work with a document in the public domain or one that
is copyrighted by one of us in trust for the group until we decide
what rights to turn over to ANSI et al.  Even better is to set up a
formal organization (non-profit corporation, I guess) that consists of
the members of these committees to hold the copyrights, but someone else
has to carry the ball on setting up the legalities of that.  This isn't
the problem we discussed earlier of how to organize the whole community
-- I think at this point we could get away with incorporating just the
committees that were selected (indirectly) by the whole community.

We need to get a clear reading from ANSI on what will happen if we bring
them a document that is public domain or copyrighted by someone else and
tell them, as the technical comittee, that this docuemnt is what we
think the Common Lisp standard should be.  As I said before, I don't
have nay problem with them making some money selling copies and/or
collecting royalties, but ownership and total control of the text is
another matter.  Whether we can come up with a sufficient set of written
agreements to make us feel good about turning ownership over to ANSI is
a complicated question.

It looks like getting this manual stuff straightened out is going to
take longer than I had hoped.  As far as I know, most of us haven't even
seen the Lucid manual yet.  I guess I'll get to work trying to organize
the issues into a set of items that we can decide, record, and stick
into the text later.  More work, but everyone must be wondering why this
is taking so long, so we'd better start making some visible progress.

-- Scott