Automatic GPL termination

[Philippe Verdy]

> De : Alexander Terekhov [mailto:alexander.terekhov at gmail.com]
> Envoyé : jeudi 13 septembre 2007 16:52
> À : verdy_p at wanadoo.fr
> Cc : Chris Travers; John Cowan; lrosen at rosenlaw.com; dlw; license-
> discuss at opensource.org
> Objet : Re: Automatic GPL termination
> 
> On 9/13/07, Philippe Verdy <verdy_p at wanadoo.fr> wrote:
> [...]
> > So when you consider all this, the exclusive rights of authors are very
> large (note
> > that in France, some rights are not even transferable...
> 
> Ha. Re "transferable." CeCILL's grants (of economic rights) are
> "transferable."

Remember that in France, author's rights are broader than just the rights
granted in the licence. Moral rights are part of authors rights and not
transferable (within the moral rights, there's the correct attribution of
authors and the requirement of not altering their opinion by falsification
of their creation). An author in France can refuse at any time any
alteration of his creation if the creation is presented referencing his
name, and if this generates a confusion about who said or made something
that could then make the authors liable of things that were not said or
done.

So not only the attribution of authors is justified (compatible with the
GPL) but it is legally mandatory due to the preservation of non-transferable
moral rights. This point is one of the most important that justifies the
argumentation against publishing something in the public domain, as public
domain does not preserve the moral rights of any living author (moral rights
are lifetime for authors, even when their creation was made when working for
a company that collects all other rights in exchange of payment of working
time, plus 70 years after his death, the only case where these rights are
transferred to the new surviving right owners that inherit these rights from
a dead author). These non transferable rights can't even be removed by
juridic orders or taken or seized as a compensation for other failed
payments or obligations by the author.

These rights by themselves have NO economical value, except if they are
abused by others (in which case, a trial may be attempted by authors against
those that abuse them, and France has a long history of trials where authors
or simple people have won large fines when their name or image was abused
without prior direct authorization: these trials are frequent against
papparazis publishing "stolen" images in the private life of people, even if
they are wellknown and have large publicity, like artists, journalists,
princesses, politicians, and even condemned criminals...).