On 26/04/2010 03:32, Michael Witten wrote:
> I thought it was decided in the course of this thread that the
> liability of an individual contributor is ultimately NOT changed by
> the assignment of the copyrights to the FSF.
>
> Also, Mark's point (I think) is that a copyright lawsuit against the
> FSF is much more likely than a lawsuit against some no-name
> contributor, and (more importantly) a lawsuit against the FSF is
> likely to trigger the FSF to launch a lawsuit against the individual
> contributor. Thus, it sort of seems to the individual contributor that
> assigning copyrights to the FSF while maintaining 'unlimited
> liability' is less safe than not assigning copyrights to the FSF.
Well, it seems to me that the FSF will not launch a lawsuit against me
unless there is actually some at least prima facie evidence that I have indeed
taken someone else's copyrighted software and presented it as if it were my
own to gift to the FSF, which would be an act of theft on my part. Since I
know that I'm not going to do that, I'm convinced that this protects me
against copyright related actions, because I know any such action launched
against the FSF would be spurious and I can prove it and they have every
reason to believe I can and that therefore they would lose; contrariwise, if I
have not done that (stealing code and presenting it as my own), then they can
be confident that they will be able to successfully defend any case brought
against them.
It probably does reduce the number of contributors who would copy and paste
someone else's code from the web or somewhere and submit it as a patch to GCC,
but the ability to get lumbered with the liabilities of code from unknown
provenance would not be such a huge benefit to GCC as to be worth it, I think.
cheers,
DaveK
