On Fri, 2003-06-06 at 18:42, John Nephew wrote:
> With an increasing number of OGL works being composed in part (sometimes
> very large part) of non-SRD contributions to Open Content, a lawsuit and
> legal threat in the area of Linux may be of interest to folks on this list.

[snip]

> How much safe harbor can an open source license like the OGL really provide?

Exactly as much as the standard contracts sent out to authors. In each
case, people releasing the content to you represent that they have the
right to do so. In each case, if they are lying, you are basically
screwed, because you can't continue to publish and there is no way to
effectively get the losses back from the guilty party, the costs of
lawsuits being what they are. In each case, if someone alleges copyright
violation, you can pass the buck back to the original source, but you
are still in trouble if there really is violation. (SCO is actually
suing IBM for putting the code in Linux, not the people who are
distributing it (which included SCO).)

OGL publishers can exercise the same filtering as they do with authors,
only applied to companies.

-- 
David Chart
http://www.dchart.demon.co.uk/
PGP Key: 1786 15B1 53A3 7ED0 CBD4 AFBE 9B61 6D10 46C9 1CBE

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