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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 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.
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
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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