On Sat, Dec 22, 2012 at 10:31 PM, Nathan Kurz <[email protected]> wrote: > I guess my question can be rephrased as: Through what legal means is > the collective copyright of Lucy (and other Apache projects) > transferred to the ASF? The quote was to show that there needs to be > an express transfer of rights from the authors to the ASF, and not > simply the granting of a license. > > Alternatively phrased, how would a court know that the ASF, and not > for example RightHaven, has legal standing to sue for redress of > copyright violations? Generally, this is only possibly by the > copyright holder, and not by a license holder. Is there some transfer > of rights outside of the licenses granted by the CLA or SGA? > > I use RightHaven as an example, not only because they are the > antithesis of the ASF, but since they recently were judged not to > have standing to sue on behalf of a copyright holder[1]. Reading that > decision, I'm wondering how the ASF would go about proving to a judge > that they have legal standing. > > But this is way off-topic for Lucy, so I'll try to find another venue > to ask, or will happily take answers offline.
Interesting question. You might want to try [email protected]. http://www.apache.org/foundation/mailinglists.html#foundation-legal Here are some pages in which I searched fruitlessly for an answer to your question, including the relevant FAQs for legal-discuss: http://www.apache.org/legal/ http://www.apache.org/foundation/license-faq.html http://www.apache.org/legal/resolved.html http://www.apache.org/legal/src-headers.html FWIW, since the Apache license permits proprietary forks, the ASF might have fewer motivations to sue somebody than the FSF -- at least for copyright. (Trademarks are important to the ASF because it would be bad if a proprietary forker could sow confusion about which product was canonical.) Marvin Humphrey
