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GPL Hard to Enforce?
the-dark-kangaroo writes "The GPL may be difficult to enforce due to a lack of clarity over who owns the copyright to the software, according to a legal expert.
Lucie Guibault, an assistant professor of intellectual-property law at the Institute for Information Law in Amsterdam, said at the Holland Open Software Conference in Amsterdam, that the GPL should clarify who is the author of the software to ensure that open source software distributed under this licence receives legal protection."
He has been enforcing GPL for over a year now with impressive results.
This guy does not know what he is talking about.
This is why contributors to GNU software are expected to assign copyright to the FSF.
This issue has been addressed, and the FSF has shown one way to handle it properly. There's nothing to see here.
Somebody get that guy an ambulance!
This isn't a real problem. The basic issue is that only the copyright holder has standing to litigate copyright violations. But it's never really ambiguous who the copyright holder is. The FSF recommends that free software developers assign their copyrights to the FSF, so that they can deal with violations. Many individual projects require all contributors to assign their copyrights to a consortium, to the project leader, or something similar. There are some projects with copyright held jointly by many developers, but there's almost always someone who you can point to and say "this person/organization holds copyright over the majority of the code". And even if it's not immediately obvious from the license who the copyright holder is, that doesn't matter in court; not knowing who has standing to prosecute is no defense.
Also, notice that "Richard Stallman, the founder of the Free Software Foundation and the author of the GPL, was unable to comment in time for this article." A brief interview with RMS would surely have cleared this up as a non-issue.
Its pretty easy to tell who owns copyright in any open source project. Most open source projects come with a tar.gz released archive containing one or more of the following files: README, INFO, CREDITS, AUTHORS, COPYING, etc... Any one of these files, in addition to the actual source code, shows clear evidence about who owns copyright in an open source project. Sometimes there is one person, sometimes more than one. The author of the article forgot to bring up these facts, and instead relies on spreading FUD.
Seriously, you can't pay someone to come up with schlock this bad.
No kidding. Check this out (from vmscan.c in the Linux kernel):
Any doubts about whose the copyright is?
This is pretty stupid. The author of a work is the copyright owner in perpetuity unless they assign ownership to someone else. If there are multiple authors then the authors as a group own the copyright. This is the way copyright has always worked.
A work is technically, and legally, copyright upon creation by the author. You don't have to register something with the US Copyright Office for it to be protected. The point of registering with the Copyright Office is to provide an official registration so that if you are legally challenged, it's likely the first person to register is the owner. But it's nothing more than a measure of protection.
If I create a work and you register the copyright in your name, the burden of proof falls to me to prove that I created it first. But if I can do that, then legally I'm protected and you are not.
So putting your name on it does nothing for it. If you want to protect it, go to the Copyright Office web site, download the form, fill it out, and send it in with you $30. That's the best protection you can have.
Quote:
A quick perusal of any GPL'd software in the world would have shown how full of shit the guy was.
The cake is a pie
There is no problem. Joe Hacker owns the copyright on the code he wrote, unless he signed it away. He did not give the copyright to Jack N. Box, so Jack N. Box's heirs do no have rights to that code. Those heirs do have rights to the code Jack N. Box wrote, which is only 10%. Company X can contact Jack N. Box's heirs for a different license, but they only have the right to that 10%. (And if they gave rights to everything they might be in trouble themselves for negotiating in bad faith since they sold rights they did not have)
There is no problem here, except that Company X has a really hard time changing the license. In general the point of the GPL is to make it hard to change the license to something else, so this is intentionall. In fact if company X goes to Joe Hacker and gets rights to his code, they may be unable to use it if Jack N. Box's heirs decide to not give those rights up. In short a tiny minority can hold the majority to not changing the license. (Again, this is by design)
Note that some people assign copyright to the Free Software Foundation. The advantage of this is the FSF will sue to make sure code they own is not misused. This saves Joe Hacker the effort of finding a lawyer when needed. The disadvantage is in theory someone can gain control of the FSF and sell rights (or just make a new version of the GPL that gives everything away), and there is nothing Joe Hacker can do. Most projects using the GNU license choose to not require code be turned over to the FSF to protect against a rouge FSF sometime in the future.
Correction - the FSF doesn't urge people to assign copyright to them on anything and everything, as you imply. They require copyright assignments on official FSF projects, of course, but there are many other Free Software projects they neither have nor want copyright on.
The stuff about french doctors doesn't seem to contribute to your post, and sounds a bit suspect, too.
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Friends don't let friends enable ecmascript.
Getting a little stickier here: What happens if person C, who's working at a corporation, contributes to the code but he signed an over-reaching agreement with his corp about ownership of his work.
You're talking about a work-made-for-hire contract, I assume. C's employer owns the changes. C may not distribute the changes to the public unless and until C's employer distributes them to the public.
An example of patenting stuff:
Popov invented radio transmission and published his results in 1895. Markoni PATENTED same results in 1897. Guess who is called the inventor of radio?