Copyright on Collections

[bruce at perens.com]

From: Nick Moffitt <nick at zork.net>
> What, then, about the copyrights on collections?  Couldn't a
> distributor easily say that the distribution being put out is a
> collection of independently licensed works, and license it in some
> restrictive way?  

You can copyright a compilation, yes, but I don't see how the copyright
could be made to apply to the individual works. So, you could prevent
someone from making a knock-off copy of Red Hat without restricting Linux
distributions in general.

I don't know of a single distribution that asserts a compilation copyright,
though. It would annoy too many people.

	Thanks

	Bruce