OT - Closing Off An Open-Source Product

[Bob Kline]

On Wed, 11 Apr 2001, Chris Watson wrote:

> > > On the other hand, if I take a public domain work, change one line, or
> > > one word, or one character, then slap a copyright notice on it, I have a
> > > legitimate copyright on the derived work.  Someone is free to do what
> > > they want with the original (is they find it); but they do not have the
> > > right to use my derived work unless they are licensed to do so.
> >
> > This is not correct.  If your contribution is sufficiently insubstantial
> > ("de minimis" in the words of the case law) you will not have a
> > legitimate copyright on the derived work.  Your examples fit this
> > category of unacceptable claim.
> 
> I believe this is correct in the case of GPL and other plauge
> licenses. No matter how much or little you change of a GPL app, if
> one letter is still original its all got to be GPL'ed. Nice way for
> the FSF to respect you're hard work. By forcing a license on you.

Sorry, no matter how noble the GNU folks might be, they can't change the
copyright laws without the cooperation of the courts and/or the
legislature, and it's not likely they'll be able to enlist the aid of
either to defeat the longstanding tenet that "de minimis" copyright
claims are not legitimate.  You want to be careful not to mix copyright
law with contract law.

I'm retaining as much of this thread as I have to make sure you still
have a chance to (re-)read the claim to which I responded, that changing
a single word or character of a public domain work was sufficient to
support "a legitimate copyright on the derived work."

-- 
Bob Kline
mailto:bkline at rksystems.com
http://www.rksystems.com