Quoting Nick Yeates (nyeat...@umbc.edu): > I too am curious what this "compilation license"ing is...
Copyright law recognises the possiblity of an abstract property called a 'compilation copyright', that being the ownership interest gained by someone who _creatively_ collects and assembles other people's works in such a way that the collective set can be legitimately seen as _itself_ constituting an original work of authorship. An example would be the editor of a short-story anthology collecting and arranging other people's stories to create a themed book. Copyright law recognises that the act of picking stories and arranging them and presenting them in a particular way is an act of creation deserving of recognition as an abstract property, completely aside from the copyright title existing in the constituent works. When I operated a dial-up BBS from (if memory serves) 1988 to 1993, my Policies bulletin asserted that I owned compilation copyright over the design and implementation of the BBS as a whole. Your term 'compilation licence', or whatever it was that people said upstream seems to refer to Red Hat's published policy asserting a compilation copyright over RHEL as a whole. By the way, when the whole 'Red Hat is violating other people's copyrights' drumbeat started in the early 2000s, I did my best to FAQ the extant situation. (I make no apologies if things have changed since then, but I doubt they have changed much.) http://linuxmafia.com/faq/RedHat/rhel-isos.html (If memory serves, the situation was then new enough that I merely speculated that RH asserts compilation copyright. It does, and grants GPLv2 redistribution permission to its rights over the collective work, while clarifying at the same time that their conveyance does not include any right to transgress Red Hat's trademark rights.) > ...and what its benefits are. Mu. _______________________________________________ License-discuss mailing list License-discuss@opensource.org http://projects.opensource.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/license-discuss
