Re: Ocean and the search for a Music Framework

[Jeff Teunissen]

Marco Scheurer wrote:

> On Mar 4, 2004, at 9:03 AM, Jeff Teunissen wrote:

[snip]

> > There seems to be some amount of misunderstanding here.
> >
> > There's really no such thing as a license issue. If the permissions
> > granted (or more likely, if the conditions under which the permissions
> > are granted) under two licenses are in conflict, then it is not a
> > "license issue", it's a "copyright infringement". [...]
> 
> No misunderstanding: if you distribute software without permission (ie
> a proper license to do so), you can be sued for copyright infringement.
> 
> My point was that if you've got a proper license, it does not matter if
> the copyright belongs to X or to Y. The fact that you can find
> "Copyright NeXT, all rights reserved" in a file is not a problem in
> itself. It becomes a problem only if you don't have the rights (given
> by a license) to distribute.

Yes, that's true. However, for MusicKit to be redistributable, the rights
Stanford would have acquired in a license to the copyright on the code must
be transferrable or sublicenseable -- that is, someone who receives the
covered code from Stanford must be able to distribute as if they were
Stanford themselves, or as if Stanford had been the original author. This is
not _usually_ something that is granted in a two-party copyright license
agreement, to my knowledge, but I am not aware of the wheres and whereases
of the agreement(s) in question.

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