[License-discuss] Idea for time-dependent license, need comments

[Lawrence Rosen]

Re: Joint and collective works

This comparison between collective and joint works has frequently been the
topic of conversation at OSI. I remember, for example, some of us arguing
that the Linux license could be changed from GPLv2 to GPLv3 by any of its
"joint authors", and that IETF standards could be licensed as "joint works"
so that any of its authors could create derivative industry standards. 

It is a nice idea in principle, but it falls flat in practice. Courts
usually require more than just a claim of joint authorship. They demand a
contract, or at least some obvious manifestation of intent, to create a
joint work. Lots of these court cases deal with rock bands that broke up.
:-) 

I am aware of no FOSS project -- particularly any that uses a contributor
agreement or membership agreement -- that would survive a court test for
joint authorship.  

On the other hand, what the world is left with is a collection of collective
works, stuck like a pincushion with tiny open source licenses on each
component. Anyone who wants a copy of the pincushion gets every individual
pin that's attached to it. A "joint work" concept might be better for FOSS
if it could be implemented by joint, contractual agreement. But it isn't. 

/Larry
 
Lawrence Rosen
Rosenlaw & Einschlag, a technology law firm (www.rosenlaw.com)
3001 King Ranch Rd., Ukiah, CA 95482
Office: 707-485-1242
Linkedin profile: http://linkd.in/XXpHyu 


-----Original Message-----
From: Mike Milinkovich [mailto:mike.milinkovich at eclipse.org] 
Sent: Saturday, July 20, 2013 9:27 AM
To: license-discuss at opensource.org
Subject: Re: [License-discuss] Idea for time-dependent license, need
comments

> > Well, I think that many would argue that such a work is a 
> > collective, rather than a joint work. In fact, it seems to me that 
> > most of the large collaborative communities are running under that
assumption.
> 
> A collective work is defined as "a work, such as a periodical issue,
anthology, or
> encyclopedia, in which a number of contributions, constituting 
> separate
and
> independent works in themselves, are assembled into a collective whole."
Now
> maybe you could claim that an individual file constitutes a separate 
> and independent work.  But a patch?
> I doubt it.

So you are asserting that by getting a single patch accepted into the Linux
kernel that I can, under US copyright law, re-license the entire work? As
long as I share any proceeds equally with all other copyright holders of
course.

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