A copyright holder who licenses his work under the GPL permits others to use some of those rights, provided they follow the conditions of the license. He releases some of the exclusivity, in return for other values he finds meaningful. The copyright owner retains the right to exclude users who don't follow the license's terms, for example, if they try to distribute derived binaries without source code. He also retains the right to distribute or license to others on entirely different terms.
Unless an owner dedicates a work to the public domain, releasing all exclusivity, the retained rights are "copyright." Instead of viewing this divisibility as a limitation, one might see it as allowing an author greater freedom: Each author has the option to release work to the public, to permit others to study and modify it, _without_ giving up all rights or all control.
--Wendy
At 02:04 PM 10/24/02 -0400, Ken Brown wrote:
Noel, Thanks for your reply. Let me be clear. There is a big difference between saying that I have a copyright, which is intellectual property ...with legal enforceable rights, and saying that I have a copyright but I choose not to enforce it vs. I have a copyright, but I choose to put my material into a pool whose members have every right to retangle, untangle, rework and modify my work.This is particularly precarious when the GPL itself says that there is unmitigated circulation of the work which is completely opposite of the basic definition of copyright. If you cannot control distribution or modification, you do not have "copyrights." Noel, I put my code in the general public pool because I don't to make any money from it. So I get credit...big deal. Credit is entirely different from enforceable copyrights. Ex: I own a piece of property...but at anytime, anybody in the General Public can use it, dig it up, change it, etc. How can you say I have ownership of the property? kb -----Original Message----- From: Humphreys, Noel [mailto:nhumphreys@;AkinGump.com] Sent: Thursday, October 24, 2002 1:38 PM To: 'Ken Brown'; John Cowan; Sujita Purushothaman Cc: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: RE: Copyright Ken, The GPL is designed to facilitate access, not to discourage "ownership." Someone owns the "property," and that someone is not the person who downloads the source code. GPL-subject software permits wide access and retransmission, because the GPL permits it, not because the "property" lacks an owner. If the downloading person turns out to be the owner, then the downloading person is at liberty to impose conditions on access to his retransmission. The GPL works only because some upstream copyrightholder continues to "own" the copyrighted work that is distributed under the license. Put differently, the downloading person remains subject to the limitations imposed by the GPL because there is a person with superior copyright ownership rights who, presumably, has the legal power to enforce the GPL's terms if the downloader tries to deal with that software in an unauthorized way. Noel D. Humphreys [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://radio.weblogs.com/0114730/
-- Wendy Seltzer -- [EMAIL PROTECTED] w: (212) 715-7815 // f: (212) 715-8192 // m: (914) 374-0613 Associate, Kramer Levin Naftalis & Frankel LLP Adjunct Professor, St. John's University School of Law Fellow, Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard Law School http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/seltzer.html -- license-discuss archive is at http://crynwr.com/cgi-bin/ezmlm-cgi?3
