-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 Brian Thomas Sniffen wrote: | Nathanael Nerode <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: | | |>Glenn Maynard wrote: |> |> |>>On Thu, Apr 08, 2004 at 11:02:51PM +0200, Robert Millan wrote: |>> |>>>The main author of Plex86 forked his own project (heh) to create the |>>>"new" Plex86 effort, and relicensed it under the MIT/X license. He |>>>asserted that, as the copyright holder, he has permission to do so. |>>> |>>>But Plex86 included many contributions of different developers under the |>>>LGPL. In order to relicense, he'd need either to have permission from |>>>each of the copyright holders of the old Plex86 project, or |>>>remove/replace the code for which he doesn't own the copyright. |>> |>>For what it's worth, there have been a lot of vague mumblings about |>>authors of "joint works" being able to license the work without requiring |>>permission |>>from other authors. |> |>Even if true, it doesn't apply to "derivative works"; it would apply to |>cases where two people, together, wrote the work jointly, at one time -- |>not to a case where one person edited the preexisting work of another |>person. (Of course, that's a really fuzzy line.) | | | So, looking at the decision of the Gaiman/McFarlane case, that doesn't | appear to be the case: despite the sequential nature of comic book | production (storyine -> script -> editor -> art -> publication), the | characters were regarded as very clear joint works by the court.
Ah, but there was no intermediate publication, which may be the actual distinction. :-P If the script had been published and then the comic book had been based on the published script, without consultation with the script author (except to get a license from the copyright holder to make the 'adaptation'), I expect it would have been treated differently. ~ In cases like that, the first copyright holder appears to generally have the right to completely prohibit further publication of the second work, unless the license he gave to the second copyright holder precludes that. :-P Unfortunately, there does seem to be a certain amount of fuzziness in the question of whether something is a joint work or a derived work. :-P -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v1.2.4 (GNU/Linux) iD8DBQFAd58bRGZ0aC4lkIIRAvClAJ4tgS+VuNBiBVkRKZmf7f+juog0sgCffQFk ODzHUoRiIhBSktNpRlzZKS0= =Y6su -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----
