Mahesh T. Pai wrote:
Jennifer Machovec said on Thu, Nov 13, 2003 at 11:17:34AM -0500,:
> placed by *or under the authorization of* the copyright owner (the
I have some problems with these wordings. What exactly constitutes
"authorisation of the copyright owner"?
The suggestion, if accepted, would result in putting the burden of
verifying that every contribution is actually authorised by the
copyright holder on the users / licensees.
Such verification would be very difficult where the copyright holder
is a large corporation (like, ahem, IBM) because it will not be
difficult for a corporate to turn around and say "we never authorised
that". The outsider will be clueless as to what exactly the flow of
authority within a corporate entity is.
OTOH, the word "placed by the copyright owner" in the official draft
is more appropriate, because the burden of proving that the person who
purportedly acted on behalf of the copyright holder and placed the
code under this license did not, in fact have the authority to do so.
The authorization would be the license granted by the copyright owner to
the entity placing the notice on the Work. This license is either the
Contributor license grant contained within Section 4 of the v.2.0
license or a separate license agreement entered into between the
copyright owner and the licensor. In the vast majority of cases, in
fact, the Licensor (e.g., ASF) will not be the copyright owner for the
underlying code but is passing on a copyright license granted by other
Contributors who have enabled the Licensor to do so. Thus, I didn't
believe it was accurate to state that the notice could only be "placed
by the copyright owner."
