GCC drops its copyright-assignment requirement

Posted Jun 9, 2021 11:58 UTC (Wed) by james (subscriber, #1325)
In reply to: GCC drops its copyright-assignment requirement by matthias
Parent article: GCC drops its copyright-assignment requirement

... And without the evidence that Bob distributed to Carol, there would be no evidence at all that Carol has any rights to the code...

I think that goes too far. The MIT license, for example, says:

Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy of this software and associated documentation files (the "Software"), to deal in the Software without restriction...

So the mere fact that Carol has a copy of the Software means she has a license, regardless of who she got it from or what license they used.

Or if Alice, as copyright holder, published:

This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation; either version 2 of the License, or (at your option) any later version.

then that is Alice licensing it to Carol (assuming Carol gets to read it), right there. What Bob thought doesn't matter (assuming Bob has no rights over the software): he has nothing to license.

GCC drops its copyright-assignment requirement

Posted Jun 9, 2021 16:42 UTC (Wed) by Wol (subscriber, #4433) [Link] (1 responses)

> then that is Alice licensing it to Carol (assuming Carol gets to read it), right there. What Bob thought doesn't matter (assuming Bob has no rights over the software): he has nothing to license.

This is exactly my point. If Matthias agrees that the GPL text is not legally a licence, when it requires that the licence be passed on, it CAN NOT be referring to itself.

But more importantly, as I said, COURTS REQUIRE EVIDENCE. If the only evidence available is Alice's statement that she granted GPL2+, then that's what the court will agree with. And yes, Bob's thoughts don't matter, because Alice did not give him permission to speak on her behalf ...

Cheers,
Wol

GCC drops its copyright-assignment requirement

Posted Jun 9, 2021 23:27 UTC (Wed) by Wol (subscriber, #4433) [Link]

Except whoops, as I've realised elsewhere, this is simply saying that Carol gets the same rights as Bob used ...

Cheers,
Wol

GCC drops its copyright-assignment requirement

Posted Jun 9, 2021 20:50 UTC (Wed) by matthias (subscriber, #94967) [Link]

> What Bob thought doesn't matter (assuming Bob has no rights over the software): he has nothing to license.

If it is dual licensed by MIT, then Bob has rights. The MIT license explicitly grants Bob the right to sublicense. And if Bob sublicenses to Carol according to MIT than Carol never got a license from Alice and thus cannot claim the rights under GPL. Carol only gets the GPL license from Alice if someone distributes to Carol under GPL terms, because these terms state that Alice will automatically license according to GPL terms.