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cc-licenses - Re: [cc-licenses] (c) 2005 All of humanity

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Subject: Development of Creative Commons licenses

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  • From: Daniel Carrera <daniel.carrera AT zmsl.com>
  • To: Discussion on the Creative Commons license drafts <cc-licenses AT lists.ibiblio.org>
  • Subject: Re: [cc-licenses] (c) 2005 All of humanity
  • Date: Wed, 12 Oct 2005 09:55:56 +0100

Greg London wrote:
Greg London wrote:

If Alice and Bob both hold copyright on some work
(the wrote a novel together, for example),
then any derivative of that novel must get
Alice and Bob's permission. Both.

No. Alice can modify the book without Bob's permission. Bob can modify
the book without Alice's permission.

I see this happen every day at OpenOffice.org. Non-Sun contributors
agree to a "Joint Copyright" with Sun, which means that they both have
copyright ownership over this person's contribution. Sun then proceeds
to re-license it under whatever propietary license they like and put it
in StarOffice.


Isn't that the same as Alice (Non-sun contributers) getting
Bob's permission (Sun's relicense)?

No. Alice doesn't have Sun's permission to relicense. She can only relicense her *own* contribution, because she /does/ own the copyright to it.

The JCA does not say "xyz gives permision to abc to relicense". It says "Alice agrees to share her copyright with Sun, so they are both copyright holders over Alice's contribution". And that statement is enough for Sun to relicense Alice's contribution inside OOo in perpetuity.


Someone please correct me if I'm wrong in saying that
a CC-SA work that has had 10 different contributers must
get all 10 contributer's permission to change the license.

<insert warning="IANAL" />

Consider three different cases:

Case I: 10 people write a book by each one writing a different chapter. So, no one has copyright over the entire book, but each has copyright over their chapter.

Case II: 10 people write a book by doing it all together and signing a "Joint Copyright Agreement (JCA)" saying "we are all equal copyright holders over this book".

Case III: 10 people write a book by each writing a different chapter. 9 of them (all but Alice) sign a JCA saying "I share my copyright with Alice".

Note: For simplicity, I'm assuming that they use a license that doesn't already allow re-licensing under different terms (e.g. CC-SA, GPL, propietary, etc).

* In Case I, each author can relicense their own chapter, but not those written by other people. The Linux Kernel and Perl work this way.

* In Case II, each author can relicense the entire book. I don't know any project that works this way, but "(c) all humanity" would.

* In Case III, each author can relicense their own chapter, and only Alice can relicense the entire work. Projects run by Sun, Novell and the FSF all work this way.

I believe that is the reason behind license "inertia"
and is what makes it so bloody difficult to change a
license once a project has acquired a number of contributers.

Sun finds it very easy to relicense the work from tons of people under a propietary license every year in StarOffice.

i.e. once you get a work like Linux licensed GNU-GPL,
the only way Microsoft could make a proprietary version
would be to get every contributer's permission to license
it that way.

But Microsoft could easily make a propietary version of OpenOffice.org if they pay Sun enough money.

Cheers,
Daniel.
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