Jon "maddog" Hall wrote: > Perhaps a German knowledgeable about this could take a couple of minutes to > explain this intricacy.
One important difference between US-style “copyright” and German-style “creator's right” (literally, “Urheberrecht”) is that German law doesn't let you transfer your copyright in a work to others other than by bequeathing it to your heirs. What you *can* do is give third parties the right to exploit your copyright in various ways, but the copyright itself remains yours for the rest of your life. (There are special rules governing works created under the auspices of one's paid employment.) This means, for example, that in Germany, a creator cannot voluntarily renounce all rights to their work in order to contribute it to the “public domain”, other than by dying and waiting 70 years, at which point it enters the public domain automatically. It also means that as a software author I can't “assign the copyright” for my code to the FSF so the FSF owns it outright and can do with it what it wants. I can, however, give the FSF fairly far-reaching rights to *exploit* the copyright on my code on my behalf. AFAIK the FSF's “copyright assignment” contracts take this into account. I have never dealt with the FSF so I can't say for sure. The GNU licenses work in Germany because they do not attempt to transfer copyright to the licensee. Instead they list a number of actions that would otherwise (by law) be the copyright holder's prerogative, and detail under which conditions the copyright holder lets the licensee perform these actions (“exploiting” the copyright as it were). German copyright law has no problem with that sort of thing. Also, as the copyright holder, I am free to decide who gets to “exploit” my copyright and under which circumstances, so multiple simultaneous licenses aren't a problem in Germany, either. Anselm (not a lawyer) -- Anselm Lingnau · [email protected] · https://www.tuxcademy.org Freie Schulungsmaterialien für Linux und Open-Source-Software Free Training Materials for Linux and Open-Source Software _______________________________________________ lpi-examdev mailing list [email protected] https://list.lpi.org/mailman/listinfo/lpi-examdev
