GPL compliance

[Alexander Skwar]

Mario Vukelic wrote:
> 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

That's the Urheberrechtsgesetz. That's not *Copyright*. An "Urheber"
is somebody, who MADE something. "Recht" means "right" and "gesetz"
is "law". If you ask in a german law mailing list or newsgroup, if
there's a copyrightlaw in germany, you'll be promptly told, thate
there's no such thing in germany. The Urheberrecht has some basic
differences in comparison to copyrightlaw as it's known in the US
(IANAL, don't ask me for details).

> 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.

Yep. There's no way to give up the "authorship", contrary to what somebody
was writing in this thread.

> 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

It did to me.

Alexander Skwar
-- 
Small change can often be found under seat cushions.
		-- One of Lazarus Long's most penetrating insights