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

Ben Tilly btilly at gmail.com
Fri Aug 17 16:44:33 UTC 2012


On Fri, Aug 17, 2012 at 9:12 AM, Lawrence Rosen <lrosen at rosenlaw.com> wrote:
> Russ Nelson asked:
>> Larry, have you ever been driving over a bridge that collapsed?
>
> Not that I can recall. :-) Out of fear of that very result, though, I
> support increased infrastructure spending by our government.
>
> But I don't stress out every time I drive over a bridge or when I use open
> source software that is owned by an individual who wants to reserve her
> moral rights. Indeed, I respect moral rights in the ways that I license and
> use open source software and I advise respectful attribution whenever
> appropriate. Does the protection of moral rights require anything onerous of
> you?

Let's see.  Linus Torvalds is Finnish and began Linux in Finland.  As
Henrik pointed out, Finnish law has the concept of moral rights, and
one of those rights is the right of integrity, which can allow the
copyright holder to restrict the use of his copyrighted material in
ways that infringe on his honor.  In particular you can say that you
can't use that work for pornography.  Oleksandr pointed us to
http://www.wipo.int/treaties/en/ip/berne/trtdocs_wo001.html#P123_20726
which says that this moral right can be enforced even in countries
which do not have moral rights in their copyright law.

I am not a lawyer.  I know even less about international law.  My
knowledge of this topic is, in fact, pretty much half an hour with
Google following up references in this discussion.  But it looks to me
like Linus might have the ability to sue a US pornography company that
is using Linux to stream their porn based on his moral right rising
from Finnish copyright law.  If so, then that would run directly
counter to OSD #6.

I trust that Linus never would do so.  But if he and many other
European contributers to open source projects actually *could* do
that, that's not exactly a small detail.  (Particularly if you were
loving using open source to distribute your loving.)



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