[HN Gopher] Software and Copyright: It's Complicated
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Software and Copyright: It's Complicated
Author : vmbrasseur
Score : 30 points
Date : 2021-04-12 15:26 UTC (7 hours ago)
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| alexashka wrote:
| It's complicated for lawyers. It's not complicated for people who
| don't have the money to hire and pay lawyers.
|
| Who is the target audience for this book?
| marcinzm wrote:
| Not having lawyers doesn't mean you won't get sued by people
| who do have lawyers.
| aranchelk wrote:
| > You could sue me for copyright infringement anyway, but you'd
| need to prove that my program copies yours. Some of the criteria
| used to prove this include the structure and organisation of the
| original source code, so even if I were to have used a different
| programming language, if I use the same code structure (even
| coincidentally) then it can appear as if I copied your program.
|
| AFAIK, at least in the US, coincidence in and of itself is just
| fine, to prove infringement the copyright holder has to show that
| the defendant had access to the work, i.e. they actually copied
| it. This would seem to rule out most scenarios with a SASS/closed
| source plaintiff.
| zabzonk wrote:
| > US, coincidence in and of itself is just fine, to prove
| infringement the copyright holder has to show that the
| defendant had access to the work
|
| That's right, which is why the Phoenix BIOS and others on IBM
| compatibles was never successfully challenged by IBM. The
| developers were given the API and were able to prove that they
| had never seen the implementation.
| runningmike wrote:
| misleading title: it's not complicated, but you can make it
| complicated. Just use cc-by (sa or nd) and an osi approved foss
| license. A good read: https://blog.hansenpartnership.com/owning-
| your-own-copyright... or see
| https://blog.codeforscience.org/intellectual-property-in-ope...
| to keep it simple!
| michaelmrose wrote:
| They recommend against using their licenses for software.
|
| https://creativecommons.org/faq/#can-i-apply-a-creative-comm...
|
| It is only for example one way compatible with say the GPL. GPL
| projects can integrate your work but may choose not to due to
| unfamiliarity but you may not integrate their work.
|
| It also expressly reserves patent rights for yourself vs gpl 3
| which disclaims them. If your software doesn't represent
| anything you intend to pursue patents on it may still put off
| companies who fear to be sued by anyone who buys it.
|
| It looks sort of complicated.
| hinkley wrote:
| Public domain software is particularly tricky situation for
| multi-nationals. Vetting an MIT licensed library is virtually a
| no-op, but some jurisdictions simply do not recognize PD licenses
| (let alone "do whatever the fuck you want" licenses people
| sometimes write while being clever). The one time I got stung by
| this it wasn't that hard to fix but things could have gone a lot
| different if we had more deeply leveraged either of the two PD
| tools that we had in our dependency chain. I swapped one for a
| slightly larger MIT licensed library, and set a coworker up to
| cleanroom the other, since I was already tainted.
| prepend wrote:
| I'm involved with some US government OSS projects and it's
| interesting US government content is public domain in the US so
| not copyrighted. This seems like it should be easy for open
| source because public domain, no copyright can be used for
| pretty much anything.
|
| However, this was confusing to many users and contributors so
| we worked with our lawyers to update the public domain notices
| to also include CC0 and MIT or ASL2.
|
| That seems to help but we still get questions about why include
| CC0 and an OSI license. There's some confusion that these
| conflict although they don't of material is released under both
| consistently. I think there are issues if you try to add one on
| top of the other.
|
| But I wish there was a cleaner way to handle this to allow for
| software and source to be used widely.
| ghaff wrote:
| There is also an MIT-0 license that is OSI approved now. It
| doesn't have the questionable patent language that caused CC0
| to eventually be withdrawn from OSI consideration.
|
| Of possibly historical interest, the MIT license was created
| in the first place because there were issues with just
| putting X Windows into the public domain.
| zokier wrote:
| Doesn't open source license like MIT or ASL2 imply that there
| is an entity holding copyright? The very first line of MIT
| license is Copyright <YEAR> <COPYRIGHT
| HOLDER>
|
| But if USG can not hold copyright, how can it then apply
| license to its works?
| dwheeler wrote:
| The USG cannot hold copyright in the _US_ in certain cases,
| but it can still apply copyright _outside_ the US. So one
| approach is to say "no copyright within the US, outside
| the US use this license".
|
| The USG _can_ hold copyright in some cases (e.g., copyright
| can be transferred to the USG). As often happens, "it's
| complicated".
| prepend wrote:
| There's potential to invalidate the license because that
| first line is left blank or is inaccurate as sometimes
| people mistakenly add a copyright notice.
|
| But our attorneys said that wasn't a problem and we haven't
| had any problems in the past decade, knock on wood.
| marcosdumay wrote:
| I don't see much problem with somebody saying "we don't
| recognize our property over X, but if you for some reason
| insist we have property over it, we allow usage under those
| conditions."
|
| It's a really Kafkanian situation. And changing the license
| to make both claims not contradict each other would be way
| worse. But given the circumstances, it's a reasonable thing
| to write.
| rdpintqogeogsaa wrote:
| Copyright for software makes it _incredibly_ difficult to just
| fire and forget about a piece of code. I do not want
| attribution, I do not want to be held liable for it, I do not
| want to give support.
|
| In the "default for-profit" view of copyright, not even wanting
| attribution is something that completely breaks the system and
| it saddens me.
| dfox wrote:
| It is the other way around. The concept of public domain only
| works in countries (eg. US) that have the common law for-
| profit copyright approach. In civil law jurisdictions where
| the copyright legislation more closely follows the idea of
| Berne convention the only way how something can enter "public
| domain" is by its copyright protection expiring.
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