From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 X-Spam-Checker-Version: SpamAssassin 3.4.4 (2020-01-24) on polar.synack.me X-Spam-Level: X-Spam-Status: No, score=-1.9 required=5.0 tests=BAYES_00 autolearn=ham autolearn_force=no version=3.4.4 X-Google-Language: ENGLISH,ASCII-7-bit X-Google-Thread: 103376,c42dbf68f5320193 X-Google-Attributes: gid103376,public X-Google-ArrivalTime: 2002-05-02 05:27:38 PST Path: archiver1.google.com!postnews1.google.com!not-for-mail From: dewar@gnat.com (Robert Dewar) Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada Subject: More on copyright, (Re: TO WHOM IT MAY CONCERN) Date: 2 May 2002 05:27:38 -0700 Organization: http://groups.google.com/ Message-ID: <5ee5b646.0205020427.4993d828@posting.google.com> References: <5ee5b646.0204301457.52a492c3@posting.google.com> <11Hz8.4180$PE6.2467133575@newssvr21.news.prodigy.com> <5ee5b646.0205010443.55afee85@posting.google.com> <3CD0043A.AB588053@despammed.com> NNTP-Posting-Host: 205.232.38.244 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit X-Trace: posting.google.com 1020342458 9826 127.0.0.1 (2 May 2002 12:27:38 GMT) X-Complaints-To: groups-abuse@google.com NNTP-Posting-Date: 2 May 2002 12:27:38 GMT Xref: archiver1.google.com comp.lang.ada:23403 Date: 2002-05-02T12:27:38+00:00 List-Id: Wes Groleau 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