Interesting statement from Eben Moglen

Interesting statement from Eben Moglen

Posted Sep 4, 2006 21:48 UTC (Mon) by bojan (subscriber, #14302)
In reply to: Interesting statement from Eben Moglen by sepreece
Parent article: Transcript of Richard Stallman at the 4th international GPLv3 conference

> So, copyright gives you the right to control distribution of your work, it doesn't [in most cases] say anything about what you're allowed to ask for in return for the right to distribute.

A *copyright licence* is a document that must, by its very definition, operate within boundaries of the copyright law. And that is because a licence is an authorisation, as defined in copyright law. You cannot authorise people to exercise rights that have not been given to you by the law - you don't have them. Not unless you involve some additional powers given to you. Sometimes a bit of trademark law is thrown into these documents. Sometimes a bit of patent law too. But, asking for things that are outside copyright law clearly involves some other legal mechanism, not copyright law itself.

What you are talking about is usually a contract (based on common law in the US, UK and Australia) that defines terms of sale of a copyright licence (that's how you ask "for things in return"). You can ask in it for additional promises and performances in return for the copyright licence you're selling. In proprietary software world these two documents (the copyright licence and the contract of sale) are usually combined into one physical document and that's what gets people confused.

You can verify all this by researching the lawsuit between Sun and Microsoft regarding Java. In this case (and other similar cases), the court's first task was to distinguish where copyright stops (i.e. the bounds of the autorisation, licence) and contract begins.

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