[License-discuss] Can copyrights be abandoned to the public domain?

[Henrik Ingo]

On Fri, Aug 17, 2012 at 7:51 AM, Henrik Ingo <henrik.ingo at avoinelama.fi> wrote:
> On Fri, Aug 17, 2012 at 5:09 AM, Johnny Solbu <johnny at solbu.net> wrote:
>> On Friday 17 August 2012 02:15, Russ Nelson wrote:
>>> but it's clear that OSI
>>> Approved Open Source contributions from people who live in countries
>>> that claim Moral Rights is inferior to people who live in countries
>>> which don't.
>>
>> Says who?
>> And why?
>
> I believe Finland has the concept of Moral Rights. As a IANAL summary,
> the concept seems to be that even if I license or sell away the
> commercial rights to my creation, I retain certain rights that I can
> never give away, such as the right to be correctly cited as the author
> of my works (which most FOSS licenses require anyway) and weird things
> like the right to forbid the use of my work for pornography or other
> things someone might find against my morality.
>
> I have never heard anyone actually asserting this for software.
> Further, some contracts I've signed, such as with Sun Microsystem,
> included language to the effect that if there are parts of my
> copyright that I cannot license away, I nevertheless irrevocably waive
> my right to assert the moral rights in court, even if they are still
> mine since they cannot be transferred/licensed. I have no idea if such
> a waiver would mean anything in court since the whole point of the law
> is quite the opposite.

Oh, one thing I've always wondered though is, what would happen if for
instance the thousands of Nokia engineers who wrote code that went
into a mobile phone started actually requiring that Nokia would
acknowledge them by name as authors of the software. In open source
this commonly happens, but for closed source software products it
could be a lot of fun!

henrik




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