So did your lawyer say what happens in the case of modifications to an existing copyrighted body of work? If somebody changes a character? osg submission are often a couple of characters or a couple of lines of fixed code.
So I think I'm weak on this, but I believe in general, each person owns the copyright to their own works. If one work is based off another, then it is considered a 'derivative work'. The original work copyright owner/holder owns the right to control derivative works. So to make a derivative work, the original owner must grant permission for others to make derivative works unless it falls under 'fair use' like parody. Licenses like the LGPL specify conditions and terms for derivative works. So assuming a derivative work is legally created, I believe the second individual owns the copyright to anything they create and does not give the original owner rights to the new stuff in the derivative work. An example might be the Tom & Jerry cartoon "Dicky Moe" which is a parody of Moby Dick. Assuming for the moment that Moby Dick wasn't already public domain (expired copyright), under parody, MGM (or whoever owns the rights to Tom & Jerry now) can use Moby Dick under fair use. But this would not necessarily give Herman Melville the rights to use Tom & Jerry in another book (sequel to Moby Dick?). I think there may be a provision for uniqueness (original work). So writing a single word like 'and' may not be copyrightable. But certainly a haiku would be copyrightable. So finding the line (if there is one) is tricky and may involve lawyers. Certainly, the safest thing is to always get permission. The lawyer covered two cases involving a short sound sample. One case is where a musical 3 note sequence was in dispute. Can this sequence be used by others to be sold in sheet music and to be reused as a sample in an original song? I already forgot the details and outcome, but I think for the sheet music, it was ruled that the 3 notes were not unique so it could be printed, but in the other case, I think the original recorded sound has another copyright for the recording/performance/specific-interpretation which is distinct from any alleged copyright for the 3 notes, so it was ruled as copyright infringement.
I'm keen to be open and follow the law. However, if you follow that every character touched is copyrighted by an individual then rapidly you end up with a legal quagmire, if you don't have a written record of copyright ownership then you don't have a means for tracking potential copyright owners, and if you don't you can't do anything w.r.t to that aggregate copyright, including taking action over copyright infringement. Once you can't enforce copyright because of copyright law then you are in real mess, so such extreme interpretations are really dangerous and would make a mockery out of the law.
You have to be practical about things, if users want to retain copyright ownership to code then they should provide a copyright notice, including means for contacting them for the term of the copyright. We could possible add a clause to website
SubmissionProtocol and perhaps a footer to osg-submission emails that unless otherwise submitter explicitly retains copyright is assumed copyright to the changes are transferred automatically to the copyright owners written at the top of the file governs.
Unfortunately, "being practical about things" isn't our right. Copyright is to protect the creators of works, not the users (and keep lawyers employed). This is also why most open source projects never relicense, because of the pain of tracking down everybody. I know a few open source projects that are meticulous about keeping contact information for this very purpose. Failure to keep good documentation is no excuse for violating copyright (or not paying taxes :)) (And I think this is why there is a explicit special clause in the LGPL which allows relicensing to GPL, which avoids needing to contact all copyright holders.) I remember some fairly high profile project went through this awhile back. Unfortunately, I don't remember which one. (Apache?) If somebody knows, this would be a good thing to research. A submission protocol might help since there is an explicit transfer of rights. But it might need to be in the license itself since the LGPL says one thing, but we are doing something else. I think this is what the Mozilla Public License does. But I think this clause is also what makes it incompatible with the GPL so you have be careful about these things. The last thing we want to do is start with a (L)GPL type license and suddenly make the new license incompatible with the old one. -Eric _______________________________________________ osg-users mailing list osg-users@openscenegraph.net http://openscenegraph.net/mailman/listinfo/osg-users http://www.openscenegraph.org/
