"Roberto A. Foglietta" <roberto.foglie...@gmail.com> writes:
> My proposal to apply the GPLv3 or AGPLv3 - not directly to an object > but - to a collection of objects using the database protection, > automatically also solves the problem of a blurry "fair use" > definition. However, to be more incisive about "fair use", it is > better to declare explicitly what is not "fair use". Otherwise, we > risk having to explain this in court. Like in this file header: > https://github.com/robang74/isar/blob/evo2/meta/recipes-support/expand-on-first-boot/files/expand-last-partition.sh > # (C) 2022, Roberto A. Foglietta <roberto.foglie...@gmail.com> > # SPDX-License-Identifier: all rights reserved, but fair use allowed > # Fair use includes test, learning and marketing but not sales, redistribution > # leasing, renting or every other commercial/business activities without the > # consent of the author. Every company or individual allowed to use this > # code behind these limitations will be listed here below, if any. I'm afraid this is not how fair use works. The whole point of fair use is that the copyright holder has no control over uses that are fair use. They can grant additional rights with a copyright license, but they cannot stop legal fair use, no matter what they write in their license and no matter what their personal opinions are about what would fall into fair use. You can see why this must be so if you think about the role of fair use in copyright law. Fair use is a carve-out for a whole class of uses to which society wants to put copyrighted works without requiring any permission from the copyright holder, and if necessary against their explicit wishes. Consider quoting small portions of a work while reviewing it, which is one of the classic areas of fair use in US law. A copyright holder might like to only allow friendly reviews to quote their work and prohibit hostile reviews from quoting their work, or, failing that, prohibit quoting in any review. But the point of fair use is that everyone gets to quote their work and they get no say in the matter. And, as mentioned earlier, free software relies heavily on this. Among the things that are carved out for fair use (and closely related concepts with roughly the same legal properties, such as limits on what types of works can be protected by copyright), is the ability to reimplement an API. There are also a lot of activities around reverse engineering that are protected by fair use and related limitations. The copyright holders of that software, if allowed to redefine those limits in their licenses, would use a far more restrictive definition that prohibited free software competition. But they can't. This means that it is largely pointless to try to define fair use in a copyright license, since the whole point of fair use is that it applies regardless of the content of the copyright license, even if the copyright license explicitly prohibits things that are legally fair use, and even in the case of no copyright license at all. The belief or definition offered by the copyright holder for fair use does not matter and should be ignored entirely for legal purposes. The only definition that matters is the one made by the legislature and enforced by the courts. And yes, it is indeed fuzzy, and it may be beneficial for governemnts to define it more precisely (assuming they didn't break it in the process). But licenses like the GPL cannot do this, since those are just statements by the copyright holder. The copyright holder *cannot* have any power to make fair use less fuzzy, since that would defeat the point of fair use. A similar principle applies to claiming compilation copyright. Either a compilation is covered by your copyright, in which case you have all the normal copyright holder rights over it unless you grant them to others with an explicit license, or it is not covered, in which case it doesn't matter what you say about it and everyone else can ignore anything you say. So declaring that any compilation including your work is covered by your preferred license is only relevant if you have a legal copyright over the compilation. If you do, then your copyright license matters; if you don't, everyone else is entitled to ignore your license and your statements. I am not a lawyer, let alone a copyright lawyer, and have only an amateur Internet understanding of the nature of compilation copyrights (and they may well also vary by jurisdiction), but my understanding (possibly incorrect) of the law in the US is that holding copyright on a member of a collection does not give you any copyright ownership of the collection as a whole. To gain copyright ownership of the collection, you have to exercise some sort of creative control over the collection itself, such as by using human creativity to select its membership, choosing some elements and discarding others. The person distributing the collection has to comply with copyright law with respect to the material included that you hold a copyright on (either satisfying your license or following the rules of fair use), but if you're not involved in creating the collection, you don't get any separate rights over the collection itself and cannot assert a license on it. There's a bunch of US case law on this around things like phone books (IIRC, found to not involve enough creativity to have a separate copyright), recipe collections (copyrightable as a compilation even though recipes themselves are not individually copyrightable), short story collections, and so forth. -- Russ Allbery (r...@debian.org) <https://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>