Re-using copyrighted code
Mark Janssen
dreamingforward at gmail.com
Sun Jun 9 13:18:41 EDT 2013
> At least partially, my confusion seems to be caused by the dichotomy of
> the concepts of copyright and license. How do these relate to each other?
A license emerges out of the commercial domain is purely about
commercial protections. A copyright comes from the "academic" domain
is pure about protecting your "intellectual property", or non-physical
creations (most from encroachment of the commercial domain, by the
way). They are on opposite ends of the spectrum, but because of our
bi-polar system the terms get used as synonyms .
In a way they are not related and it all depends on what court would
listen to the case. In a German court, you would almost certainly be
tried under the commercial framework, In the US, in theory (and this
is where it must be pushed to enforce the people), it *should* be the
opposite if the court is doing its job of upholding the Constitution.
You use a license when you want to authorize use of something you own
in a commercial setting. You use copyright when you're protecting
authorship of something and have not given it away (something you
never really want to do anyway).
> I understand that I have to pick a license for my package.
You actually do not. Attaching a legal document is purely a secondary
protection from those who would take away right already granted by US
copyright.
> And may be
> I'm not free to pick any open source license due the license used by
> Secret Labs AB. But how does that relate to the copyright statements?
The thing, like I noted, is that they've already released the code
into the public eye. Now you must only do your due diligence to
honor the *spirit* of their intent. And that spirit, regardless of
whether they made it explicit, is almost certainly for non-commercial
(non-profit) use.
> Should I put my own copyright line in every source file in the package?
I would put it as a separate file in the package as well as a comment
line in each file referring to your file.
> How about the file that re-uses portions of sre_parse.py? Can there or
> should there be two copyright lines in that file, one from Secret Labs,
> one my own?
Show (c) YourName, Secret Labs and carry-forward any additional usage
terms from them.
--
MarkJ
Tacoma, Washington
More information about the Python-list
mailing list