Relicensing: what's legal and what's right

Posted Sep 7, 2007 23:30 UTC (Fri) by giraffedata (guest, #1954)
In reply to: Relicensing: what's legal and what's right by butlerm
Parent article: Relicensing: what's legal and what's right

"The copyright in a compilation or derivative work extends only to the material contributed by the author of such work, as distinguished from the preexisting material employed in the work, and does not imply any exclusive right in the preexisting material. The copyright in such work is independent of, and does not affect or enlarge the scope, duration, ownership, or subsistence of, any copyright protection in the preexisting material."
So if you start with a dual licensed file, and add additional material, the dual license only necessarily extends to the pre-existing material. The additional material is copyright by the author - who may license those additions in any way he pleases, provided that distribution of the whole is consistent with the license that governs each of the copyrighted portions.

You've read that backwards. The whole point of derivative work copyright is that the first author has rights over the entire derivative work done by the second author. (A classic derivative work is a translation. The translation contains no words from the original work, but you still need the original author's permission to copy the translation).

This section says 1) you don't need the second author's permission to copy the first author's pieces; and 2) the permission you need from the first author to copy the derivative work isn't any greater than what you need to copy his original work. In particular, his clock runs out N years after the original was published, not N years after the derivative was published.