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Copyright assignment is about enforceability, not updating the license. It's much easier to maintain copyright registrations, and to prosecute an infringement c
by wahern 5y ago
Copyright assignment is about enforceability, not updating the license. It's much easier to maintain copyright registrations, and to prosecute an infringement case, when you control all the copyrights.
Anyhow, we don't have to guess why they want it:
> Under US copyright law, which is the law under which most free software programs have historically been first published, there are very substantial procedural advantages to registration of copyright. And despite the broad right of distribution conveyed by the GPL, enforcement of copyright is generally not possible for distributors: only the copyright holder or someone having assignment of the copyright can enforce the license. If there are multiple authors of a copyrighted work, successful enforcement depends on having the cooperation of all authors.
> In order to make sure that all of our copyrights can meet the recordkeeping and other requirements of registration, and in order to be able to enforce the GPL most effectively, FSF requires that each author of code incorporated in FSF projects provide a copyright assignment, and, where appropriate, a disclaimer of any work-for-hire ownership claims by the programmer's employer. That way we can be sure that all the code in FSF projects is free code, whose freedom we can most effectively protect, and therefore on which other developers can completely rely.
https://www.gnu.org/licenses/why-assign.en.html https://www.gnu.org/licenses/why-assign.en.html
- daptaq 5y agoYes, it is probably primarily about enforceability, but why should that mean that updating the license is also part of the consideration?
- wahern 5y agoThere could be all kinds of secondary motivations, including that ability. But most GPL'd software includes the "or later" provision, which means it's relatively easy for the FSF to update the license of projects, especially if they stipulate that contributions must be licensed thusly. Note that with or without assignment, the FSF could never rescind the license on previously released software, except perhaps for infringers (because of the termination clause). So assignment doesn't actually provide much value on that score except as it relates to enforcement.
- linuxhansl 5y agoCan't you enforce a license too? A license is a contract and if code is released in breach of that license than should be enforceable as well. Is the issue that a license breach is a legally weaker case than copyright infringement?
- CRConrad 5y agoA license is not (necessarily) a contract, so a license breach is (mainly) enforceable precisely because it _is_ a copyright violation.
- Blikkentrekker 5y ago> Under US copyright law, which is the law under which most free software programs have historically been first published, They are published with a worldwide public licence; I'm not even sure how one can publish something such as that under any specific law. One drafts a public licence, and different parts of it are enforceable to different degrees in different jurisdictions. It is of course quite possible for the licence to be gnostic of the country of the acceptee, and apply differing provisions in different cases, but I would feel such would strongly go against F.S.F. philosophies.