More on copyright, (Re: TO WHOM IT MAY CONCERN)

[dewar@gnat.com (Robert Dewar)]

Wes Groleau <wesgroleau@despammed.com> wrote in message news:<3CD0043A.AB588053@despammed.com>...
> TO EVERYONE WHO SAW THE OTHER MESSAGE:
> 
> I hereby explicitly claim copyright on all differences
> between that message and the original submission
> to SIMTEL-20.  I hereby withdraw ANY rights
> I've assigned to the FSF for ANY copies made
> anywhere, any time.  I hereby give permission
> to anybody, anywhere & anytime to make the same
> changes.

But you can't claim copyright here. You have created a
deriviative work without the original authors permission.
That is in itself a copyright violation. You can only
create a deriviative work if you have an agreement with
the original author to do so. Whether that agreement
leaves you with any copyright interest is a matter
to be decided by the copyright agreement.

You are not in a position to give permission to others
to repeat the same violation of copyright.

Yes, of course in this case it is *probably* OK, and
yes, when individuals do this sort of thing, they are
*probably* OK, since it is not worth suing individuals.
On the other hand, when that individual widely publishes
the work, that's upping the risk a LOT over just doing
it yourself for yourself (which after all may well be fair
use -- up to a court to say -- and if you ask for RD's
non-binding opinion on what ought to be, this *should*
be fair use).

The reason I am making these points here is not because
I suspect a real problem in this particular case (it is
a reasonable guess that the original author, undoubtedly
not himself being an expert in such matters, just assumed
that by putting the material out without any kind of
notice he was establishing an implicit permission. That's
wrong, there is no such procedure, but probably Wes was
right in guessing the intention).

My point was that these days, with so much stuff floating
around the net, you have to be very careful that you *know*
what you are picking up. Once again, for personal use, in
practice (and maybe in law, depending on how fair use is
interpreted), there is nothing to worry about, but when
you start publishing stuff to others, or using the material
in any kind of commercial endeavor, then you can be in
deep water very fast.

Consider the following. Suppose you reverse engineer
Microsoft Power Point and fix a bug. If you
use that just for yourself, then

a) Microsoft won't know about it and won't bother you

b) It may well be that there is no copyright violation
here and that a jury would decide this is fair use,
whatever the microsoft license says (I would not imagine
a jury being sympathetic to Microsoft claiming that you
were not allowed to fix such an error for your own use).

But if you publish this modified/fixed version, MS may
definitely come after you. Whether they will sue rather
than just pressure you to cease and desist is a matter
of circumstances and how deep your pockets are. For
example, if you are a competitor and make a rival package
and on your web site it says

"For those whose bosses insist on using powerpoint, and
who can't stand dealing with xyz error, we have posted
a fixed version of powerpoint. We sympathize with you
having to use this inferior software, but at least this
fixed version will make one serious headache go away,
sorry we can't do anything about the rest [except
persuade you to abandon the dark side and use our
product :-)]"

Then I would bet that Microsoft would sue :-) :-)

The other point is that copyright assignment is not something
you can just do out of the blue. It must be done by formal
agreement. In fact the FSF will only accept copyright 
assignments under very stringent conditions (including
a willingness to provide certain forms of indemnification,
and also the FSF has to be convinced that it wants the
copyrights).

For example, in the case of GNAT, the original version done
at NYU was assigned to the FSF through a formal agreement
between the FSF and NYU (this assignment was required by the
government contract -- an unusual requirement for such a
contract). THe ongoing assignment of parts of the GNAT
technology by ACT to the FSF comes from a separate
agreement.

Of course you can always choose any license to use for your
own stuff, and you can use the GPL or GMGPL freely, without
assigning your copyright.

It really is important for people to be careful here. I have
come across all sorts of unfortunate cases. In one big project
they were using a version of CYGWIN that GPL'ed but not
LGPL'ed (or using any other similar license). They were clearly
in a situation of having violated Cygnus/Redhat copyrights. I
told them they had better contact Redhat and get a commercial
license, whether they did I do not know!

Robert Dewar