On Wed, 19 Jan 2005 22:36:42 +0200, Paul Surgeon <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> Then some scumbag comes along and collects a whole lot of these free > contributions, removes the credits, labels them as his own work, puts them > onto a CDs and sells them for $30 - 50 profit. > > This has happened several times (2 that I know of) in the MSFS community and > the authors get irrate that someone is charging money and taking credit for > what they freely gave to the community. > > Fortunately most of these works are copyrighted and not GPL and they managed > to get lawyers involved and stop these pricks from carrying on their > underhanded business. > > If the authors released their work as GPL those "low lifes" wouldn't even have > to change the credits and what sort of recourse would the authors have then? I think you might be a bit confused: GPL works *are* copyrighted, and the copyright holder can still sue someone for removing credit or for violating the license in any other way. In the cases you mentioned, the people could just as easily have gone to court if the sounds had been GPL'd or LGPL'd. Personally, I'm a lawyer's son, so I know how unprofitable suing usually is (except for the lawyers); as a result, I sometimes prefer to abandon copyright claims altogether and simply make my work Public Domain, as I did with SAX. The GPL does not allow you to stop someone else for charging to redistribute your work, but it does require that person to let everyone else know where the work originally came from (i.e. where they can get the same thing for free). Many companies actually make a business out of the GPL by dual-licensing their own work -- release for free under GPL (which imposes certain restrictions on commercial use), then sell a commercially-licensed version of the same stuff without the GPL requirements. All the best, David -- http://www.megginson.com/ _______________________________________________ Flightgear-devel mailing list [email protected] http://mail.flightgear.org/mailman/listinfo/flightgear-devel 2f585eeea02e2c79d7b1d8c4963bae2d
