Development of Creative Commons licenses

[Alexander Genaud <alexgenaud AT gmail.com>]

Matt,

I'm not sure I follow. Would the authors need to specify that a work
were a joint work or is that implied by their names on the same
copyright notice?

> To clarify the scenario below, the novel would be a joint work (assuming
> this was the intention) and, therefore, either party could issue licenses
> (e.g., for derivative works) so long as the licenses are non-exclusive and
> there is an accounting to the other.

Daniel, Greg, Matt, et al,

Clearly the implications of "(c) all of humanity" were not as I
expected. However, I think this discussion is opening up the doors to
my (mis)understanding of the public domain and copyright.

Given a work (c) Alice and Bob.
With no other information (licenses, notices, permissions):

(1) May Alice publish a derivative without Bob's permission?
(1a) May she publish a derivative (c) Alice only?
(1b) May she publish a derivative (c) Alice and Bob?

(2) May Alice publish unchanged without Bob's permission?
(2a) May she publish unchanged (c) Alice only?
(2b) May she publish unchanged (c) Alice and Bob?

According to OpenBSD's Copyright Policy
(http://www.openbsd.org/policy.html) "a copyright of a derivative work
does not affect the rights held by the owner of the copyright of the
original work, rather only the part added. Likewise the copyright of a
compilation does not affect the rights of the owner of the included
works, only the compilation as an entity."

The GNU/FSF recommends
(http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/gpl-faq.html#AssignCopyright) that
contributors "assign the copyright on his contribution to the FSF, or
disclaim copyright
on it and thus put it in the public domain."

GNU/FSF's rational (http://www.gnu.org/licenses/why-assign.html) for
assigning copyrights to the foundation is that "only the copyright
holder or someone having assignment of the copyright can enforce the
license. If there are multiple authors of a copyrighted work,
successful enforcement depends on having the cooperation of all
authors."

I wonder why the GPL (and the CC-SA) does not explicitly state
something like: you may copy, modify, distribute, etc, provided ...
(open/copyleft) ... and you agree to assign any copyright over your
derivative to the original author.

As for the GPL and Linux, I had incorrectly assumed that Linus
Torvalds held the copyright and by virtue of that exclusive copyright,
he was able to grant permissions to others (the terms of the GPL).
However, in Torvalds own words (http://lxr.linux.no/source/COPYING):

5  Also note that the GPL below is copyrighted by the Free Software
6  Foundation, but the instance of code that it refers to (the Linux
7  kernel) is copyrighted by me and others who actually wrote it.

(c) 2005 Alexander E Genaud
http://genaud.org/2005/10/copyright.html

This work 'as-is' we provide.
No warranty express or implied.
We've done our best,
to debug and test.
Liability for damages denied.

Permission is granted hereby,
to copy, share, and modify.
Use as is fit,
free or for profit.
These rights, on this notice, rely.
--
CCC7 D19D D107 F079 2F3D BF97 8443 DB5A 6DB8 9CE1