GPL gives up author's rights [LWN.net]

GPL gives up author's rights

Posted Aug 22, 2003 15:49 UTC (Fri) by giraffedata (subscriber, #1954)
In reply to: Aiming at the GPL? by brouhaha
Parent article: Aiming at the GPL?

You're not seeing the big rights picture. Any time one person gets a right, someone else loses one. The GPL or any other copyright license gives the licensee the right to make a copy and takes away from the licensor the right to keep the licensee from making a copy.

Yes, the copyright holder retains other rights, such as the right to keep someone else from making a copy, but he has clearly ended up with less copy right than he had before he issued the license. That's why he normally gets something in return for the license, to compensate for the lost rights. In the case of GPL, he gets, among other things, a promise from the licensee that he will GPL his enhancements of the work.

People usually talk about this transfer of rights as "licensing" the right rather than "waiving" the right, but "waiving" is clearly a correct term.

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GPL gives up author's rights

Posted Aug 22, 2003 18:57 UTC (Fri) by brouhaha (subscriber, #1698) [Link]

People usually talk about this transfer of rights as "licensing" the right rather than "waiving" the right, but "waiving" is clearly a correct term.

Perhaps it is technically correct, but I have NEVER seen a copyright holder granting a license described in this way before. People don't describe Microsoft's EULA for Windows or Office as a waiver of Microsoft's rights, but in the sense you describe, it would be.

Perhaps I misinterpreted it, but the posting to which I was originally responding seemed to be attempting to make a point that the GPL was unique or at least rather unusual in acting as a waiver. I would claim that the GPL "waives" even less rights than the BSD license, and I have yet to see anyone claim the BSD license to be unenforceable because it is a "waiver".

GPL gives up author's rights

Posted Aug 22, 2003 21:04 UTC (Fri) by ksmathers (guest, #2353) [Link]

To say that a license is enforceable means that neither party to the license can back out of the license after the fact. Thus to be enforceable, SCO must be required to continue allowing the copied sources to be distributed under the terms of the GPL, and anyone in posession of that code must comply with the terms of the GPL if they distribute that source code or binaries based on it.

There is nothing unusual about the GPL with regard to its waiver. I have the feeling that we are getting stuck on semantics. Please feel free to substitute license, grant, or exercise for waiver throughout all of my messages if you are unhappy with the use of the word waiver. Regardless of the word you choose, I was attempting to explain why and how SCO can argue the legal rationale that they should not be bound to the terms of the GPL for code that they have rights to, and that originated from UNIX.

If anything the BSD license would be even weaker with respect to these arguments than the GPL is, but not because it is a waiver, rather because it doesn't exact any consideration in exchange for the waiver/grant/exercise of rights.

The question is whether SCO can back out of a bad bargain. There are two reasons that they can. First they can back out because there was no consideration, so the license can be invalidated. If the court decides that there was consideration then they can back out because of the mutual mistake of both SCO and the public that Linux did not contain UNIX source code. If both arguments fail and if SCO can't come up with some other theory under which the license can be invalidated, then the GPL can be enforced upon SCO.