FSFE welcomes KDE's adoption of the Fiduciary Licence Agreement (FLA) [LWN.net]

FSFE welcomes KDE's adoption of the Fiduciary Licence Agreement (FLA)

Posted Aug 22, 2008 22:47 UTC (Fri) by pynm0001 (guest, #18379)
In reply to: FSFE welcomes KDE's adoption of the Fiduciary Licence Agreement (FLA) by dlang
Parent article: FSFE welcomes KDE's adoption of the Fiduciary Licence Agreement (FLA)

> but I would have thought that the busybox lawsuits would have put to rest
> the fiction that unless the copyrights are assigned to the project there
> is legal questions on the ability to sue for infringement.

There are not legal questions on the ability to sue for infringement.
Rather, there are legal questions on the ability of the project to sue for
infringement. Copyright violations are enforced by the owner of the
copyright, a project has no right to step in and sue for a random
developer. That is, with an agreement such as this.

Notice that the BusyBox lawsuits were filed on behalf of the developers of
BusyBox, just as the Free Software Foundation handles enforcement actions
on GNU software. In both cases these are enforcement actions from the
copyright holders.

The reasoning here is if a developer wants to avoid copyright infringement
of his GPL-ed software but does not want to or will be unable to handle
enforcement actions himself. He can delegate that to the KDE e.V. in this
case. The flipside is that the KDE e.V. gets certain powers as well now
(enumerated in the agreement that was ratified).

But there are definitely issues for large projects where developers
maintain their own copyright without some kind of agreement like this.

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FSFE welcomes KDE's adoption of the Fiduciary Licence Agreement (FLA)

Posted Aug 23, 2008 14:10 UTC (Sat) by jejb (subscriber, #6654) [Link]

Any copyright holder can do a one time delegation to a lawyer to sue for infringement. You still have to sign a few papers because it's done in your name, but that's it. This is how the SFLC is enforcing busybox (every new suit requires a new authority from the copyright holders).

So the idea that the authority has to be delegated in perpetuity, like the FLA does is incorrect.

On the other hand, project contributors do die or move on to other things (and change email address). If the infringement of a distributed ownership work is only a small amount of code, you have to be able to find the owners of exactly that code in order to begin a lawsuit.

The main problem with the FLA for the kernel for example is that we'd have to find all the authors to begin using it. However, perhaps there's the case for a better and weaker instrument. Something that permitted X to sue on behalf of developers but didn't do the exclusive assignment rights (the latter are what require all authors). To be effective it would really only need authors covering reasonable areas which will be much easier to put together and provide the same level of infringement protection as the FLA.

FSFE welcomes KDE's adoption of the Fiduciary Licence Agreement (FLA)

Posted Aug 23, 2008 20:52 UTC (Sat) by dlang (✭ supporter ✭, #313) [Link]

by the way, the full text of the announcement says that developers are not required to sign over their copyrights, but this is in place for those who want to.