On 2/8/2010 1:40 PM, RJack wrote:
Just ask Bruce Perens and about twenty other BusyBox developers
Registration of copyright is for the author's contribution to a work, or for the result of compiling the contributions of others into a single work. It does not necessarily claim ownership of the entire work. Please see Gaiman v. McFarlane, 360 F.3d 644 (7th Cir. 2004). Therefore, it is not relevant that there are other authors of BusyBox, or that they do not wish to enforce the GPL against infringers. <http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Gaiman_v._McFarlane> The creator of a compilation is entitled to copyright it as long as it’s a work “formed by the collection and assembling of preexisting materials or of data that are selected, coordinated, or arranged in such a way that the resulting work as a whole constitutes an original work of authorship.” 17 U.S.C. § 101; see also § 103. The compiler’s copyright entitles him to reprint the contents of the compilation in future editions of the compilation. 17 U.S.C. § 201(c); New York Times Co. v. Tasini, 533 U.S. 483, 493-97 (2001). But all the other rights of copyright remain in the authors of the contributions, provided the contributions satisfy the criteria of copyrightability. Therefore the compiler’s copyright notice is not adverse to the contributors’ copyrights and so does not put them on notice that their rights are being challenged. On the contrary, “a single copyright notice applicable to the collective work as a whole serves to indicate protection for all the contributions in the collective work, except for advertisements, regardless of the ownership of copyright in the individual contributions and whether they have been published previously.” United States Copyright Office, Circular No. 3: Copyright Notice 3 (2004); see Sanga Music, Inc. v. EMI Blackwood Music, Inc., 55 F.3d 756, 759-60 (2d Cir. 1995); Abend v. MCA, Inc., 863 F.2d 1465, 1469 (9th Cir. 1988), aff’d under the name Stewart v. Abend, 495 U.S. 207 (1990). ... In addition to the copyright notices, McFarlane registered copyright on the issues and the books. But to suppose that by doing so he provided notice to Gaiman of his exclusive claim to the characters is again untenable. Authors don’t consult the records of the Copyright Office to see whether someone has asserted copyright in their works; and anyway McFarlane’s registrations no more revealed an intent to claim copyright in Gaiman’s contributions, as distinct from McFarlane’s own contributions as compiler and illustrator, than the copyright notices did. The significance of registration is that it is a prerequisite to a suit to enforce a copyright. More precisely, an application to register must be filed, and either granted or refused, before suit can be brought. 17 U.S.C. § 411(a). _______________________________________________ gnu-misc-discuss mailing list gnu-misc-discuss@gnu.org http://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/gnu-misc-discuss