Quoting Anatoly Vorobey, from the post of Tue, 24 Aug:
> > >
> > No, they are also copyright holders on the entire new work.
> 
> Come again? You, the owner of the original work, are definitely not a 
> copyright holder on the whole of my derivative work.

true, but then how do you claim copyright ownership on your entire
derived work when parts of it were not written by you and are infact "in
your way" from relicensing the work under any license other than the
GPL?

furthermore, if we, non-lawyers, go back to the preamble, how does that
settle with the spirit of the GPL?

>    The copyright in a compilation or derivative work ***extends only to 
>   the material contributed by the author of such work, as distinguished from 
>   the preexisting material employed in the work ***, and does not imply 
>   any exclusive right in the preexisting material. 
> 
> I read the part delimited by asterisks as saying that I have copyright 
> on the whole of my derivative work in which your parts were used, 
> but I cannot be said to hold copyright on your parts in this work. 

well, wouldn't you say that's a contradiction? how do you distinguish
"my derivative work in which your parts were used" from "your parts in
this work"? define "parts" to begin with?

I can say "to be or not to be" in a play and it's mine but quote an
entire Shakespearian sonette and it's shared copyright? (ignore the fact
Willy has been dead for a few decades and his work is PD, it's an
example). In which case, how to you define "quote" and "sonette" in
Code?

> reality, where the important point is to get you to authorise my 
> creation of the screenplay - which will probably happen under the 
> appropriate contract or license restricting what I can do with it and 
> how I would share hypothetical profits with you.

I am afraind in reality any man (under fair use) can do whatever he
wants with a product he bought or a text he legally obtained. I can
re-translate the entire hitchhiker's guide since I have Imanuel Lotem's
work, but without the agreement of the Douglas Adams estate, I cannot
redistribute it, either for free or printed and sold for money, would
you not agree?

> of GPL, written offers to provide the source if I don't include it, etc. 
> etc., then the GPL allows me to distribute your work. It doesn't 
> restrict me to distributing it under the GPL exclusively.

seems odd to me.

I can see a case where you give someone a GPL package someone else
wrote, and seperately sell her a patch for it under a different and
totally conflicting license, whereupon she is allowd to patch the two
together and compile them for her personal use. for instance binary bits
of the kernel I get from EMC to get powerpath to work on the Fiber
channel or ATI drivers that I insmod on my home machine but cannot be
distributed in the kernel. another example - Debian solves the
distribution rights problems od MS fonts, Real and Flash players, by
installing a package that contains not the disputed program but a script
that legally downloads and installs it for you from an authorized site.
For Qmail, it's against the DFSG to distribute the binaries, but OK to
package the untouched source and patches to build and install on yor
machine.

etc...

-- 
The color of success
Ira Abramov
http://ira.abramov.org/email/

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