RE: hold off until the copyright can be clarified

Noel Welsh wrote:

> Here are the main points I recall:
>
>   - Only signed written statement is sufficient for
> copyright assignment.  However online statements such as we
> have are sufficient for licence assignment.

Right, which is why we're doing it that way, i.e. authors retain copyright
on their contributions, but agree to license those contributions under LGPL.

> So authors could licence the Cookbook to us at very liberal
> (e.g. BSD) terms and we could then on-licence to a publisher

Just to be clear, authors have no right over the "Cookbook" as a whole in
any case, only over their own contributions.  The Cookbook itself clearly
qualifies as a compilation under international copyright agreements -- see
e.g. [1].  The compilation is being produced by "us", i.e. the Schematics
Editors, according to the currently posted agreement.  As such, copyright in
that compilation naturally assigns to us.  (Note that compilation copyright
has no effect on the copyright of individual contributions.)

The agreement related to compilations derived from the metadata would
probably require some fairly expert legal analysis.  Since it might not have
any obvious precedent, legal opinions might vary, in which case nothing
would be certain until it is tested in court.  However, that test would most
likely occur in a situation where someone attempted to produce an infringing
compilation, in which case it would be up to the publisher to decide how
strong their case is, based on the circumstances, and whether to pursue it.

I'm perfectly happy to delay further announcements until this has been
settled to our satisfaction, but I'm still not clear on exactly what
concerns we're trying to address.

Anton

[1] Article 5 of http://www.copyright.gov/wipo/treaty1.html



-------------------------------------------------------
This SF.Net email is sponsored by BEA Weblogic Workshop
FREE Java Enterprise J2EE developer tools!
Get your free copy of BEA WebLogic Workshop 8.1 today.
http://ads.osdn.com/?ad_id=5047&alloc_id=10808&op=click