Concurrent Licenses?

[Justin Wells]

On Tue, Apr 11, 2000 at 01:05:39PM +0100, W . Yip wrote:

> The bottom line is that A cannot license what he does not own. And A
> certainly cannot own B's copyright to the derivative 'bits' if these indeed
> do subsist.

I think this is why the copyleft in the GPL is worded like this:

    b) You must cause any work that you distribute or publish, that in
    whole or in part contains or is derived from the Program or any
    part thereof, to be licensed as a whole at no charge to all third
    parties under the terms of this License.

The GPL does not attempt to regulate what C does with B's work. The GPL 
regulates the terms under which B licenses the work to C (something B does). 

I think there are two ways to look at this, and I'm not sure which is right:

  -- A has implicitly given B permission to sublicense under these terms,
     and C gets only a single license from B.

  -- C gets a concurrent or joint license from A and B 

In either case B plays a role in licensing here, and should be able to 
take action against an infringer.

> I do not agree that only the copyright holder can sue. Surely an owner of
> copyright to the derivative bits has sufficient interest at stake to have
> standing to sue? No doubt he first has to show copyright subsistence, but
> once he has established that, I don't see a reason why he can't sue.

This is why I have this controversial clause in my license, which everyone
thinks is going to be difficult to get right:

  For the sole purpose of taking action to remedy the unlawfull distribution
  of our software and recover damages, lawfull distributors shall be
  considered beneficial owners of the right to copy and distribute it, and
  so shall have the authority to pursue such actions.

(Note: the wording has changed slightly since I last posted it).

I want to make sure that every major stake holder has the right to sue, 
even if their stake is that they profit by distributing the software. For
example, a distributor like Red Hat depends on everyone else following 
the license as they do. If a competitor could access all of Red Hat's 
improvements to Linux, but refused to share their own, then surely that
harms Red Hat in some way and they ought to be able to sue someone. 

Without a clause like this, Red Hat could maybe sue the copyright
holder for failing to uphold the license. But that's not really what's
wanted here.

Justin