The Copyright Act preempts the GPL

[jcowan at reutershealth.com]

daniel wallace scripsit:

> When you impose a "condition" on another person's exclusive legal
> rights you are asking that person to wave a legal right. After all,
> the right is "exclusive" and no one may impose a condition without
> that person's concious agreement to waive that right.

Very good.  But the maker of the derivative work is in no position to
attack the GPL, for absent the GPL he has no license to the original
work at all.  At best, as I said, he could claim that the original owner
is estopped from changing from the GPL to a more restrictive license or
withdrawing it altogether, at least as regards his rights.  Which is a
Good Thing.

> In order
> to secure the modifying author's permission to distribute his work in the
> derivative copyright work, a "binding legal form" must be implimented. 

You said that before, but as far as I can see there is no warrant for it.
The right to distribute (as opposed to the right to create) derivative
works is not one of the enumerated exclusive rights; it belongs fully to
the (licensed) creator of the derivative work.

-- 
Andrew Watt on Microsoft:                       John Cowan
"Never in the field of human computing          jcowan at reutershealth.com
has so much been paid by so many                http://www.ccil.org/~cowan
to so few!" (pace Winston Churchill)            http://www.reutershealth.com
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