GPL compliance

[Mario Vukelic]

On Sat, 2006-07-01 at 23:41 +0200, Alexander Skwar wrote:
> Well, you know, there's no such thing as copyright in *the* law,
> if I'm not mistaken.

There is. There even is the Berne Convention which is an international
treaty thea unifies copyright globally
http://www.law.cornell.edu/treaties/berne/overview.html

Since you're in Germany, you should have visited the Wizards of OS 3,
conference in Berlin 2004, where Eben Moglen (legal counsel of the FSF),
Lawrence Lessig (law prof in Stanford), people from the UN and others
had panel discussions about copyright law.
Moglen's and Lessig's sites are a good read, they also have talks
transcripts of the Wizard of OS, so you can catch up :)
http://www.lessig.org/
http://emoglen.law.columbia.edu/

> > As a licensee you have no distribution rights at all.
> 
> Depends on the license, doesn't it? :)

I meant as a licensee under default copyright law.

> Okay, understood. But it would be interesting to see how *the* (ie.
> *my* law) puts it. I'm not yet convinced, that what you wrote is true
> even in Germany or all over the world.

Germany: http://www.gesetze-im-internet.de/urhg/index.html
US: http://www.copyright.gov/
http://www.copyright.com/ccc/do/viewPage?pageCode=cr10-n
Berne Convention: see above

Not to be snappish, but those are the first hits if I google
Urheberrecht or "copyright law", respectively.

In short: in the US, copyright is understood as an artificial
limitation. Exclusivity to your works is not considered a natural right,
and if you release something, you have given up those rights. This is
based on the concept that  ideas, once let loose, can't be contained. 

HOWEVER, 

section 8 of the US constitution defines that 

"The Congress shall have Power (...)
To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for
limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their
respective Writings and Discoveries"

Since therefore the author's rights are entirely a concept of positive
law, the author can do with them as he wishes, e.g. sign away
completely.

In Europe, the author's exclusive rights are considered more a natural
right than in the US. As a consequence, in many jurisdictions you can't
sign away *all* rights, a so-called moral right remains, which might
give you a handle if the new rights owner does something morally
reprehensible with your creation.

IANAL, but Eben Moglen said in Berlin that he sees nearly no difference
in practice between EU and US in how they handle copyright, regardless
of the different legal foundations. A German prof for law (forgot the
name) did see differences, but seemed not very convincing to me