Re: Joint and collective works This comparison between collective and joint works has frequently been the topic of conversation at OSI. I remember, for example, some of us arguing that the Linux license could be changed from GPLv2 to GPLv3 by any of its "joint authors", and that IETF standards could be licensed as "joint works" so that any of its authors could create derivative industry standards.
It is a nice idea in principle, but it falls flat in practice. Courts usually require more than just a claim of joint authorship. They demand a contract, or at least some obvious manifestation of intent, to create a joint work. Lots of these court cases deal with rock bands that broke up. :-) I am aware of no FOSS project -- particularly any that uses a contributor agreement or membership agreement -- that would survive a court test for joint authorship. On the other hand, what the world is left with is a collection of collective works, stuck like a pincushion with tiny open source licenses on each component. Anyone who wants a copy of the pincushion gets every individual pin that's attached to it. A "joint work" concept might be better for FOSS if it could be implemented by joint, contractual agreement. But it isn't. /Larry Lawrence Rosen Rosenlaw & Einschlag, a technology law firm (www.rosenlaw.com) 3001 King Ranch Rd., Ukiah, CA 95482 Office: 707-485-1242 Linkedin profile: http://linkd.in/XXpHyu -----Original Message----- From: Mike Milinkovich [mailto:[email protected]] Sent: Saturday, July 20, 2013 9:27 AM To: [email protected] Subject: Re: [License-discuss] Idea for time-dependent license, need comments > > Well, I think that many would argue that such a work is a > > collective, rather than a joint work. In fact, it seems to me that > > most of the large collaborative communities are running under that assumption. > > A collective work is defined as "a work, such as a periodical issue, anthology, or > encyclopedia, in which a number of contributions, constituting > separate and > independent works in themselves, are assembled into a collective whole." Now > maybe you could claim that an individual file constitutes a separate > and independent work. But a patch? > I doubt it. So you are asserting that by getting a single patch accepted into the Linux kernel that I can, under US copyright law, re-license the entire work? As long as I share any proceeds equally with all other copyright holders of course. _______________________________________________ License-discuss mailing list [email protected] http://projects.opensource.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/license-discuss _______________________________________________ License-discuss mailing list [email protected] http://projects.opensource.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/license-discuss
