As the SFLC and Erik Andersen are learning to their dismay, a valid Copyright Office registration of an open source project such as a version of BusyBox requires the registration of all the *individual* contributors' work all the way back to the original author's initial contribution. In order for a complex and evolving derivative work "as a whole" to be registered, each recursive, preexisting version must also be registered -- a virtually impossible task when multiple authors are involved see for example:
"[5] Morris contends that the holding in Streetwise Maps, Inc. v. Vandam, Inc., 159 F.3d 739, 747 (2d Cir. 1998), that the registration of a derivative work meets the jurisdictional requirements of 411(a) in a suit for infringement of the original work where the claimant owns the copyright in both, requires us to find that if Cond Nast was a "copyright owner" of Morris's articles at the time it registered the issues of Allure in which they appeared, then those articles are registered for the purposes of 411(a). See Woods v. Universal Studios, Inc., 920 F. Supp. 62, 64 (S.D.N.Y. 1996), cited in Streetwise Maps, 159 F.3d at 747. We disagree. In Streetwise Maps, the plaintiff apparently owned all of the rights to the original work at the time it registered the copyright. See 159 F.3d at 746-47. In this case, it is undisputed that Cond Nast owned only some of the rights to Morris's articles at the time it registered the relevant issues of Allure."; MORRIS v. BUSINESS CONCEPTS, INC., 283 F.3d 502 (2d Cir. 2001). This leaves the remaining possibility that an individual contributor may register with the Copyright Office only his own *exclusive* contribution of source code. This requires submitting for registration the source code files *not* modified or patched by other project members. The next looming question is how do you find and compare an individual author's contribution in thousands to possibly millions of bytes of object code in some executable program? The chances of a GPL project's enforcement in a federal court is dead long before the judge ever reads the GPL. Sincerely, RJack :) _______________________________________________ gnu-misc-discuss mailing list gnu-misc-discuss@gnu.org http://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/gnu-misc-discuss