andrzej zaborowski <balrogg@...> writes: >OSM, Wikipedia and other projects having joint ownership by its >contributors could have quite important consequences, personally I >think it's very unlikely that this is right. The cost to acquire >joint authorship would be low and the rights acquired very broad. In >my view it would effectively be a loophole in copyright which would >allow any other compatibly (e.g. share-alike) licensed work to be >imported into the database and then relicensed under any other terms. >Anyone could become a joint copyright owner in any (freely licensed) >work they wish.
That's my view as well. If making a joint work really were so easy, we would see contributors to Linux, for example, taking advantage of it. The FSF would be tearing their hair out trying to close this loophole in a new version of the GPL. So I don't think it is quite as simple as that. But I was unable to convince the two American lawyers on this point. They did say that they had only scratched the surface of this issue and had not researched it in depth. So the comments about joint copyright ownership should be taken as a starting point for future investigation rather than a definitive statement. I mentioned the joint ownership issue to the LWG in their weekly conference call but I got the impression that none of the LWG members were particularly concerned about this issue or motivated to change the contributor terms to allow for it. So I asked the lawyers not to spend further time on it. >I remember Anthony on the osm-fork list has previously explained why >OSM is not a joint copyright work and what would be required for it to >be one, have the lawyers considered that reasoning? No, I wasn't aware of the arguments here. I could ask them to undertake further research about this but only if there is interest from the LWG or the OSMF board. -- Ed Avis <[email protected]> _______________________________________________ legal-talk mailing list [email protected] http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/legal-talk
