On Tue, 10 Jul 2012 08:57:52 -0400, Tom Callaway wrote: > On 07/10/2012 05:22 AM, Michael Schwendt wrote: > > This may be another chance for smartasses to jump in with general legal > > pedantry, but I don't consider that helpful. > > All accurate legal interpretations are essentially "pedantry".
This mailing-list is impressive at times. Not! :-/ Pedantry alone wouldn't be a bad thing. Lack of accuracy is what makes it bad. Combine pedantry with accuracy, and this thread may become helpful. But instead, there is a lot of speculation and assumptions, and rose-coloured glasses are involved, too. And no IANAL disclaimers seen anywhere. If you really want to contribute "accurate legal interpretations", let's discuss a specific scenario/case. > What I don't consider helpful is making broad generalizations about > legal issues. Copyright doesn't fail to exist because it isn't > attributed. That's a generalization. And a dangerous one. In particular, since we would first need to discuss what requirements a creation must meet to qualify for copyright. That alone is not a simple topic. Also, imagine that both a main developer [of a project] and a patch contributor own copyright on an almost identical work they've created. Such as a code change that involves more than touching a single line, but which may still lead to duplication or high similarity, because multiple people have worked on the same problem coincidentally. If the patch author decides to offer his work to the project, nothing forces the project developer to copy [or adapt] the patch instead of applying the own work, which may be *very* similar or even equal (if it comes to small code changes). One would need to examine the final code changes in detail to decide whether any copying of copyrighted work has been involved and whether that could have been avoided. It boils down to some forms of etiquette, whether and when main project developers recognize contributed patches as substantial and automatically give proper credits *before* a copyright holder wants to enforce rights. It shouldn't be too much to ask for that a contributor explicitly points out what the main developers are expected to do (such as giving credits, adding names to copyright notices, e.g.) when copying or adapting a patch or only parts of it, even if they may just do that to save some time. It could be that more patches would be rejected because they would not be considered substantial enough and not applicable to copyright. There's the loop again. ;) > Yes, the copyright situation on a long-lived FOSS project > like Audacious is rather complicated. +1 That sounds reasonable. -- Fedora release 17 (Beefy Miracle) - Linux 3.4.4-5.fc17.x86_64 loadavg: 0.29 0.34 0.34 -- devel mailing list devel@lists.fedoraproject.org https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/devel
