> -----Original Message-----
> From: piclist-bounces@mit.edu On Behalf Of Alan B. Pearce
> Sent: Tuesday, October 16, 2007 9:19 AM
>
> >The license that is the subject of the court case is not the GPL,
> >it is the Artistic License. The project changed its license to the
> >GPL some time this past summer to hopefully avoid this problem
> >with future releases.
>
> It is still a copyright, that the court has invalidated. Are you really
> saying that I can go down to the library and photocopy a whole
> book on the basis of this court judgement?

If we assume that this court ruling is correct, I personally make no such
assumption, but this discussion has been assuming that this one un-appealed
ruling is correct.

So on that assumption of correctness, yes, if the copyright holder of a book
modified his rights by releasing it under the Artistic License then the
copyright holder has waived his rights and you can copy it. This is why very
few books are released with additional licenses. The author and publisher
usually want full copyright protection so they do not add a license to give
others rights usualy reseverd for the copyright holders. If the project had
distributed the software with a simple license retaining their copyright in
full (e.g. most commercial software) then they would have kept their rights.
If they had used the GPL instead of the Artistic License I suspect they
would have won the case. In any case if they had used the GPL the Free
Software Foundation would have provided the legal defense for the project
because they are the GPL creators and defenders.

The key point for everyone to get here is that if you apply a license to
your work that gives away some of your rights you should expect that those
rights are gone. The entire purpose of a license for copyrighted works is to
reduce the rights the copyright holder retains.

>
> Yes the project is changing its license, with the next release of
software,
> but I wonder where the decision leaves a lot of people, from the music and
> video industry, down to painters, photographers, and goodness knows who
> else, that claim copyright to works.

This ruling will not affect anyone who has not specifically reduced their
copyrights by adding the Artistic License to their works.

Paul Hutch


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