Re: Battle for Wesnoth relicensing

[Alexander Terekhov]

Hyman Rosen wrote:
[...]
> > Section 2(b) of the GPL would seek to prohibit activities that
>  > Section 106 of the Copyright has not reserved for copyright owners
> 
> While the right to create a collective work is not restricted
> to the copyright holder, it hardly matters in the case of the
> GPL, because you have no right to copy the GPLed portion of the
> collective work except as the GPL allows, and the only way to
> do that is to license the collective work as a whole under the
> GPL. 

Did I really miss the breaking news that the FSF has sued Novell for not
using the GPL to license Novell's collective works which are "based on"
tons of GPL'd staff including the entire Gu-NÜ project? Note that Novell
doesn't license its Gu-NÜ-slash-Linux collective works under the GPL.

http://www.novell.com/products/opensuse/eula.html

------
The Software is a collective work of Novell; although Novell does not
own the copyright to every component of the Software, Novell owns the
collective work copyright for the Software. 
------

> It doesn't much matter even in more traditional cases. If

See (the term "compilation" includes "collective work"):

http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Index:H.R._Rep._No._94-1476

----- 
Between them the terms ''compilations'' and ''derivative works'' 
which are defined in section 101 comprehend every copyrightable 
work that employs preexisting material or data of any kind. There 
is necessarily some overlapping between the two, but they basically 
represent different concepts. A ''compilation'' results from a 
process of selecting, bringing together, organizing, and arranging 
previously existing material of all kinds, regardless of whether 
the individual items in the material have been or ever could have 
been subject to copyright [...] an unauthorized translation of a 
novel [i.e. derivative work] could not be copyrighted at all, but 
the owner of copyright in an anthology of poetry [i.e. compilation] 
could sue someone who infringed the whole anthology, even though 
the infringer proves that publication of one of the poems was 
unauthorized. 
----- 

regards,
alexander.

--
http://gng.z505.com/index.htm
(GNG is a derecursive recursive derecursion which pwns GNU since it can
be infinitely looped as GNGNGNGNG...NGNGNG... and can be said backwards
too, whereas GNU cannot.)