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Open Source Law
Russ Nelson writes "The U.S. Supreme Court just announced its refusal to review the 5th
Circuit's en banc decision that there can be no copyright of
privately authored laws offered to U.S. governmental bodies for adoption. The
model law itself may be copyrighted, but once it's adopted, the law
must be open source. The entire case is laid out on Peter Veeck's
page." Slashdot touched on this before, but never really covered this dispute in depth. Here's a nice legal summary of the case.
"The Primary Purpose of Copyright Law is not to Provide a Benefit to Authors, But to Provide the Public With Access to Authors' Works."
Fascinating, isn't it?
You were mistaken. Which is odd, since memory shouldn't be a problem for you
This should really be considered "Public Domain" law rather then OpenSource. OpenSource, by definition is copyrighted material. While material in the public domain is without copyright.
Mecworks BLOG
Then you would have no GPL and no restrictions upon who uses/distributes the code.
Slashbots are always quick to condemm copyright law and seldom realize that it is because of copyright law that things like Linux and BSD are able to be what they are.
No. The situation is this:
A private organization creates some specifications for building. They hold the copyright on this, as they are the creators.
The organization offers the codes to municipal governments for adoption into law.
The private organization wants to keep the copyright over the material itself. They don't want to lose control of these specifications; if that happened then another individual or private organization could freely use the specifications in their own work (such as in building handbook).
The court decided that since the private organization in question had offered the specifications to governments for use, they didn't retain ownership over what was adopted into law.
Now I think the courts made a wise decision. But, you know, it's not a cut-and-dried issue; you can make arguments for both sides. The plaintiffs in this aren't trying to copyright laws--their copyright existed BEFORE the laws were enacted. The question is whether their copyright survives the process of being adopted by governmental entities, and I know this is heresy on slashdot, but not every legal case is a matter of common sense--these are complicated issues.