Re: Licensing and copyright

[James Henstridge <james daa com au>]

On 23/02/04 17:36, Jean-Michel POURE wrote:

> [1] In the event of a court battle, individuals and authors may have 
> to appear
>
> in front of US courts, even if the FSF is defending them.
>  
This seems like a bit of a red herring.  If you have assigned your 
copyright to the FSF (and they have the papers to back up the 
assignment), then it is their problem.

If a US entity violated the license on some code that you used, are you 
sure you could sue them in your local court if they don't have a 
presence in your country?

> [2] In the event of the FSF going bust (after a court battle for example), the 
> judge may not be bound to the FSF contracts. In certain circumstances 
> (terrorism, war, the FSF going bust, etc...), a judge may be able to rewrite 
> the FSF contracts and sell its assets to the most offering company.
>  
I am not a lawyer, but I would think the only way some entity could buy 
any of the FSF's copyrights would be to become the "successor in 
interest" to the contract that gave them ownership of the code in the 
first place.  They would be bound by the same contract as the FSF was.  
If they broke the contract, you could sue them.

The point I was making previously is that the FSF copyright assignment 
contract has strings attached that limit what can be done.  It is 
primarily designed to give them enough power to distribute the code in 
question as free software and defend the code in court, should the 
situation arise.

> This outlines the drawbacks of putting "all eggs into the same basket".  My 
> concern is that the assigned rights may fall under the umbrella of one single 
> law system. 
>  
As has been mentioned previously in this thread, the Berne Convention 
already provides for a degree of commonality.  I don't know whether the 
differences in countries' laws is relevant though.  If I violate your 
copyright in Australia, surely I have violated Australian law rather 
than French law, right?

> I see no problem in Japanese citizen assigning rights to the FSF Japan, 
> Russian citizen assigning rights to the FSF Russia, etc...
>  
The logical extension of this is to not assign copyrights at all (which 
I think is a valid option -- it is the defacto Gnome copyright policy up 
to now).  But if you are assigning copyright, I don't think the country 
issue is too big a deal.

James.

--
Email: james daa com au
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