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From: Rob Landley <landley@trommello.org>
Reply-To: landley@trommello.org
To: Daniel Berlin <dberlin@dberlin.org>, Robert Love <rml@tech9.net>
Subject: Re: Bitkeeper outrage, old and new
Date: Sun, 20 Oct 2002 19:38:49 -0500
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Cc: Xavier Bestel <xavier.bestel@free.fr>, Ben Collins <bcollins@debian.org>,
       Jeff Garzik <jgarzik@pobox.com>,
       Linux Kernel Mailing List <linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org>
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On Sunday 20 October 2002 18:04, Daniel Berlin wrote:
> On 20 Oct 2002, Robert Love wrote:
> > On Sun, 2002-10-20 at 18:52, Daniel Berlin wrote:
> > > On Sunday, October 20, 2002, at 05:51  PM, Robert Love wrote:
> > > > It is called copyright _assignment_ for a reason.  How the hell are
> > > > two people supposed to simultaneously own a copyright on the same
> > > > work?
> > >
> > > Joint authorship.
> >
> > The FSF Copyright Assignment is not joint authorship, it is copyright
> > assignment.  They alone possess the work's copyright.
>
> Of course.
> But you asked "How the hell are two people supposed to simultaneously own
> a copyright on the same work?"
> The answer is "Joint authorship".

An analogous legal concept, for those of you who have taken a community 
college business law course (and if you haven't, it might be a good idea), is 
the partnership.  See "joint and several liability".  (There's a reason they 
invented the corporation...)

As far as I understand, joint authorship does not apply to the linux kernel 
because the contributors are operating under a license to an existing work 
rather than an up-front collaboration between partners to produce a specific 
good.  (Joint authorship pretty much happens up-front.)  The fact the 
contributors largely don't know each other, and that patches are discrete 
entities which may be individually tracked (and thus individually owned), 
work in here too.

It's more like designing and manufacturing spider man collector cups.  The 
drawing on the cup is a new copyrightable item, but the character being 
portrayed is a licensed entity.  A license to put your own drawing of 
spider-man on a plastic cup doesn't give you the right to turn around and 
stick that drawing on pajamas and bath towels, even though it's your drawing 
which you have a copyright on.  In this kind of collaboration, you must have 
compatable licenses for the components...

I am not, of course, a lawyer. :)

Rob