On Thu, 2005-09-22 at 00:02 -0600, Cameron Schlehuber wrote:
> If someone takes "Little Red Riding Hood" and just changes the word "Red"
> wherever it shows up to "Green", then claims a copyright of some kind or
> another on it, and someone else changes every other word "Red" to "Green"
> (half red and half green), and the first person who thinks they hold a
> copyright tries to take the second person to court, I doubt they would
> succeed (certainly not if I were on the jury!) Just like changes to a
> legitimately copyrighted work must not be simply derivative of the original
> work for someone to claim a new copyright, doesn't the same rule apply to
> public domain works? In other words, for anyone to have any form of
> copyright hold on their derivations from public domain VistA, the changes
> would have to be sufficiently significant that it was clearly a new work (to
> the proverbial "reasonable person" as the courts like to refer to).
>
No.
A work that is in the public domain is just that. Anyone is allowed to
take it and do whatever they would like with it.
This is in fact why companies such as Disney prefer to take old fairy
tales and stories and turn them into movies. They are unable to be held
to any form of copyright, and are able to do whatever they would like to
the story. In fact, in cartoons specifically, this is very very common.
How many different interpretations of fairy tales have you seen done by
WB and Disney? Its a seemingly endless number.
This is in fact exactly one *huge* difference between something that is
in the public domain, and something under a BSD style license (to
whoever was saying they are the same).
Once something is releasing into the public domain, it is available for
fair use by anyone, for anything.
Hopefully this definition will make it clearer:
Definition: A public domain work is a creative work that is not
protected by copyright and
which may be freely used by everyone. The reasons that the work is not
protected include:
(1) the term of copyright for the work has expired; (2) the author
failed to satisfy statutory
formalities to perfect the copyright or (3) the work is a work of the
U.S. Government.
(from: http://www.unc.edu/~unclng/public-d.htm)
My understand of VOE (which could be very wrong) is that CMS is
developing it with the help of outside contributors. Because there are
outside contributors involved, it could be considered software that is
not a 'work of the U.S. Government' and not required to be under the
public domain. This last bit I am not clear on, but it does seem like
the intent is to release it into the public domain.
Also, that is a clear distinction. You release something 'into' the
public domain, not 'under' the public domain. It is not a license, it is
more like a giant pool of available knowledge and information.
As far as your example, it would obviously have to be decided by a
court, but under our legal system, it is a moot point, as the lawyer for
the second would argue that the second work is a derivative of the
public domain work, not the first, copyrighted, work. But, both the
first and second persons would be exactly correct in claiming a
copyright on their respective derivative works.
Anyway :).
> And by the way, it seems reasonable to be wrong for me to write code to a
> patent that I do not hold and try to distribute that as GPL. Likewise, if
> the person who holds the patent tries to collect some advantage by applying
> a GPL to their own patented code, they shouldn't be permitted to distribute
> such a tar-baby either.
>
You can distribute your own patented code under the GPL without any
issue. But if you attempt to prosecute anyone for using that patent, you
(and everyone else) are no longer able to distribute even *your own* GPL
patent-containing code. However, because you are the author of said
code, you are free to sue using your patent, and then release a new
version of your code under another license. If you look into some
history of the licensing behind Eclipse, many critics will explain that
they view the Eclipse license (the CPL) as a patent-grab license using a
semi-similar tactic. I have no real feeling one way or the other, but I
will never contribute code to a CPL licensed project, nor will I ever
depend on or look at the source for one, just to err on the side of
caution.
Anyone who writes any code is always able to re-license it under another
license, regardless of what license it is under at any point. You are
the copyright holder, you do control it. (Under current US copyright
law, in theory your heirs control it for 70 years past your death, but
because software is not yet that old, it has not come up in practice).
--Todd
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