Re: More FSF hypocrisy

[Hyman Rosen]

Rjack wrote:
> Uhmmmmm. No 17 USC 103(b)?

17 USC 103(b) is irrelevant to the GPL. That section of the law
refers to the copyrights that the creator of a combined work gets
on the part of the work that is his alone, and that this added
copyright does not affect the duration of the copyright of the
existing material.

> The ORIGINAL and MODIFYING authors BOTH waive their exclusive
> copyrights in the work "as a whole" in order to distribute.
> It's a bilateral contract.

It's not a bilateral contract, and no one (in the case of the GPL)
is waiving their exclusive rights. Each author, independently acting
under 17 USC 106, authorizes the making and distribution of copies
of the work he owns provided certain conditions are met. When the
author of the combined work licenses it as a whole under the GPL,
he can do this because the license of each piece, created by the
author of that piece, permits him to do so.