US Supreme Court rules for Google over Oracle [LWN.net]

US Supreme Court rules for Google over Oracle

Posted Apr 6, 2021 1:17 UTC (Tue) by rgmoore (✭ supporter ✭, #75)
In reply to: US Supreme Court rules for Google over Oracle by bauermann
Parent article: US Supreme Court rules for Google over Oracle

Copyright is a made-up concept that the government decided to create to incentivize creators with the ultimate goal of improving society as a whole.

Yes, copyright is a made-up concept that exists as the government's way of achieving a broader social goal. But in the service of that goal, the government has made it possible to assign copyright to someone else. This is a good and necessary thing. At the very least, it must be possible for a copyright holder to assign the right to their work temporarily. If they can't temporarily assign the right to copy, authors couldn't get a publisher to print their book, musicians couldn't license their songs to be played on streaming services, and software authors couldn't allow users to put copies of their software on their computers. And if you're going to allow people to transfer the copyright temporarily in exchange for a fee, it would be strange not to let them transfer it permanently.

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US Supreme Court rules for Google over Oracle

Posted Apr 6, 2021 10:35 UTC (Tue) by sabroad (guest, #92392) [Link] (2 responses)

> And if you're going to allow people to transfer the copyright temporarily in exchange for a fee, it would be strange not to let them transfer it permanently.

Licences are not "transfers" of copyright, not even temporarily: only the copyright holder has the right to licence the work.

The reason for copyright assignment is not because licences exist but that work-for-hire is the norm.

US Supreme Court rules for Google over Oracle

Posted Apr 6, 2021 17:46 UTC (Tue) by rgmoore (✭ supporter ✭, #75) [Link] (1 responses)

Licences are not "transfers" of copyright, not even temporarily: only the copyright holder has the right to licence the work.

Yes and no. An exclusive license looks a lot like a temporary transfer of the property, especially if it comes with sublicensing rights. I think this gets at a bigger reason our legal system tends to look at things like copyright as forms of property: it's a useful abstraction. Just as Unix treats all kinds of things as files, even when they aren't, the legal system treats all kinds of things as property even when they aren't. Our legal and business systems are built around the concept of property, and they've spent centuries learning how to reason about it. Treating more and more abstract kinds of things- contracts, obligations, debts, government granted privileges, or what have you- as property lets lawyers and business people apply those centuries of case law and business processes to them. Even if the abstraction is imperfect so there need to be new principles added, like fair use for copyright, starting from well established principles means they aren't inventing everything from scratch.

US Supreme Court rules for Google over Oracle

Posted Apr 7, 2021 0:04 UTC (Wed) by bauermann (subscriber, #37575) [Link]

I thought it was important to mention that copyright isn't property because this imperfect analogy has been used in the past to argue for stronger copyright protection while avoiding to discuss any corresponding benefit to society.

It's an argument Lawrence Lessig made in the Free Culture book far better than I ever could. 🙂

US Supreme Court rules for Google over Oracle

Posted Apr 8, 2021 17:02 UTC (Thu) by smurf (subscriber, #17840) [Link]

No, assigning copyright to somebody else is not necessary by any means. There are jurisdictions (Germany for instance) where that simply is not possible. I create a work, I (or the company employing me for that purpose) hold the copyright; after I die, my heirs do. End of story.

So what happens instead? I sell an exclusive and perpetual license to exercise those rights to somebody else. Same effect as a copyright transfer but an entirely different legal theory behind it, which matters a lot e.g. when the work is translated to a new medium that didn't exist when the sale took place. Lawyers tend to have a lot of fun trying to guess the intent behind those contracts.