On Wed, 28 Jan 2004 [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: > Russell McOrmond scripsit: > > > If I take a Hollywood movie, create a laugh track where I think > > something funny happened, it is not my right to distribute the new > > combined work. > > Nobody disputes that. But Daniel is claiming that if you *do* in fact have > permission to create the movie + laugh track, that you *also* then need > further permission to distribute it.
There are two rights, and two situations that the GPL seeks to clarify. Granted the GPL could have used more clear language, but everything is still consistent with copyright law. The worries expressed in the original subject line do not seem to exist. If you modify an existing work then you need to worry about permission to create the derivative work. If you simply add to the existing then you need to get permission to distribute the works "linked" together. There are two separate rights and situations, and the permission/licensing is needed for both. In my movie analogy if I were to add a "movie review" to the end of the movie I would still need to get permission to distribute the whole tape. In this case the permission needs to be granted by both the copyright holder of the original movie and myself as copyright holder of the "movie review" in order for this new tape to be distributed. I can still license and distribute my movie review separately if I wanted to, or never distribute it at all, but if I wanted to "link" the two together (supply them on the same tape, etc) then there needs tob e compatible permissions from both copyright holders. In the case of Linux you already have several hundred copyright holders, so talking about a single original copyright holder doesn't have much meaning. Any new code added needs to be licensed (at least) in a license compatible with the licensing terms of *all* other contributors. If you were to violate the terms of those license agreements you would then be violating the copyright of hundreds of copyright holders, any of which can then sue you. This is part of the SCO case. They want to distribute a version of Linux under license terms that would violate the copyright of the hundreds of copyright holders in Linux. http://www.flora.ca/copyright2003/section92.html#sco Whether or not they are a copyright holder to a portion of the Linux kernel is largely irrelevant to the question of whether they could legally distribute Linux under licensing terms incompatible with the permissions of all the other copyright holders. Whether SCO holds copyright on a "laugh track" (derivative work) or a "movie review" (linked work), or copyright on nothing at all, any attempt to distribute the works of all these other copyright holders outside the terms of a copyright permission is an infringement of the copyright of the several hundred copyright holders to components of Linux. ----And just to make things that much more interesting .... ;-) The multiple-compatible-licenses <http://www.fsf.org/licenses/license-list.html#GPLCompatibleLicenses>, multiple contributors aspect of Linux makes things confusing. If I wanted to license my contributions (new code, not modifications to old code!) to the Linux kernel under a BSD license I could do so. The Linux project could distribute my contribution as part of the whole "program" and, since all licenses to all contributions are compatable, everything is fine. Then SCO comes along and wants to distribute their derivative of the Linux kernel under a GPL incompatible license. In this case the contributions that were under the BSD license may not in fact have their copyright infringed, only those who had contributed with licenses which disallow derivatives to be licensed differently. SCO is able to have a GPL incompatible license that is still BSD compatible, infringing the copyright of some copyright holders in Linux but not others. Analogies are great when there is only two copyright holders involved, but real life is never as simple as an analogy ;-) --- Russell McOrmond, Internet Consultant: <http://www.flora.ca/> Governance software that controls ICT, automates government policy, or electronically counts votes, shouldn't be bought any more than politicians should be bought. -- http://www.flora.ca/russell/ -- license-discuss archive is at http://crynwr.com/cgi-bin/ezmlm-cgi?3
