[License-discuss] proposal to revise and slightly reorganize the OSI licensing pages

[John Cowan]

Chris Travers scripsit:

> I am not 100% sure but I think after the changes in 2010, exclusive
> licensees are now assumed to have sublicense rights as well.  

An exclusive license is really a transfer of copyright ownership, and the
entire bundle of rights (including the right to say what the license is)
goes with it.  Existing licensees may be protected by promissory estoppel,
but merely potentional licensees are not.

> If I give a book publisher the right to sublicense my book, I would
> assume at a minimum they could tell a magazine they could serialize
> it, for example, and on what terms.  Presumably they could license an
> excerpt to be published in an anthology and set terms (within certain
> limits dependent on the contract with the publisher) for that
> publication.  Maybe they could even negotiate movie rights.  

Indeed.  It used to be usual for the author to transfer all rights
(making the publisher an exclusive licensee) and nail down profit-sharing
in the contract, but nowadays publishers usually buy just enough rights
for their immediate needs: for example, magazine publishers usually want
"first serial rights".

> A program linking to another
> program is not "based on" that other program in that sense regardless
> of the mechanism of linking any more than an anthology is based on the
> pieces published therein.  

The question is whether the linked program is a derivative work of its
parts or merely a collective work.  Larry says "collective", the FSF says
"derivative".  Infinite are the arguments of mages.

-- 
What is the sound of Perl?  Is it not the       John Cowan
sound of a [Ww]all that people have stopped     cowan at ccil.org
banging their head against?  --Larry            http://www.ccil.org/~cowan