On 6/7/2010 2:53 AM, [email protected] wrote:
Erik Trimble<[email protected]> wrote:
In the European Copyright law as well as in the US Copyright law, you need
to have a decsion that get's a majority of the contribution (not from lines
but from Copyright relevant creation) and all contributors with more than
aprox. 5% contributions need to vote for the change.
I cannot speak for GNOME, but for e.g. the Linux kernel, you would need
much less than 50 pro votes.
Jörg
That's not true for US Law. I went through this process awhile ago for
some textual material (a compilation book), and several US IP Lawyers
were very much in agreement that *every* author had to give explicit
permission to publish or change anything that they owned copyright on.
The US doesn't have any concept of "abandonware" or "community rights"
to a copyright. The author has full ownership of the work, and the only
non-authorized use of such a work is in the very narrow statutory
exemptions (commonly called "fair use"). Relicensing without explicit
permission would be a very cut-and-dried lawsuit win for the aggrieved
author of the relicensed work here in the US.
Ask Simon Phipps.... He told me that there is a paper from Eric Raymonds wife
(who is a lawyer) that confirms my statement.
The background in the European law is that a minor contributor does not get
the right to control the "way of marketing" and the coice of the license
is (in a OSS project) the "way of marketing". Minor contributors only have
the right to receive a fractional part of the revenue from marketing the
software but cannot control how this is done.
Jörg
Nope. US law has no concept of insignificant contributution - if your
contribution is part of the whole, your permission has to be sought for
any use of YOUR material. The sole exceptions revolve around
critique/parody/et al where your material is either being cited, a
small excerpt quoted for reference/comparison/criticism/et al, or the
material is being parodied.
The 3 IP lawyers were very clear on that concept with me - copyrighted
material is OWNED, in the same way someone OWNS a car; I can't
appropriate it for any purpose except for the very limited exception
noted above. If I want to relicense some software, I have to get the
explicit permission of every copyright owner, or exclude that material
from the relicensed product. The grey area is for material that
attribution is unknown (i.e. the author can't be identified). A lawyer
will tell you that you're risking legal exposure, since if someone later
comes along and claims copyright of that material, you've violated their
rights. So, with unknown material, it's a crapshoot. But for known
material, you need everyone's OK.
That paper would seem to be an interesting legal theory, but it would
have to be argued. Case law is on the other side.
Which reminds me: is Germany a Civil law or Common Law country?
(and, now, we are *waaaaaay* off topic)
--
Erik Trimble
Java System Support
Mailstop: usca22-123
Phone: x17195
Santa Clara, CA
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