[Bf-committers] copyright and suzanne

[Jean-Michel Smith]

This is a discussion that is probably more appropriate to ipwars or 
groklaw, but nevertheless there are several inaccuracies here that need 
to be addressed.

Douglas Toltzman wrote:

>United States copyright law also requires that the copyright holder be
>vigilant in protecting his/her copyright.  If a copyright holder doesn't
>pursue copyright violations, he/she is essentially saying that they have
>waived their copyright protection.
>
No, that is patently wrong.  TRADEMARK holders must actively defend 
their trademarks.  Copyright holders can sit on their copyright for 
years, then sue someone for infringement years later.  One can choose to 
enforce one's copyright at a time of their own choosing, so long as it 
is within the term of the copyright in question (life + 70 years here).  
IIRC Paul McCartney has had personal experience with this, in the US and 
elsewhere.  Certainly many other musicians have.

>  Furthermore, the copyright holder must
>be able to show monetary damages.
>  
>
No.  Copyright holders can get injunctions stopping further infringement 
even if the monetary damage is zero.  Monetary damages are only one 
aspect of what may be awareded in a civil suit.  Control over the 
derivative product may or may not be awarded independent of actual 
monetary damages.  You do have to prove monetary damages to be awareded 
money by the courts (treble damages if the infringement was willful), 
but not to spike a derivative work you don't like.  Numerous rappers who 
have resampled music without permission lost the ability to use their 
own work as a result of this, even though no monetary damage was shown.

>U.S. Copyright laws are convoluted and difficult to understand.  They
>do not provide clear guidelines for many, common situations.  For example,
>when your browser copies a copyrighted photo from the internet to your
>disk cache, that is, technically, a copyright violation
>
True.

>As the owner of a software development company, and a professional content
>creator, I've had several opportunities to research copyright law and to
>consult copyright attorneys.  Although you are technically correct, I
>do not think the topic merits any anxiety.
>
I disagree.  Being clear up front can help folks avoid a world of 
heartache later.  The Blender Foundation is an organization that may 
well outlive its current members.  If and when Ton and others retire, 
someone else will take his place.  There is absolutely no guarantee that 
his successor will be a kind person, and indeed over the long term, one 
can generally be assured that, at some point, someone who is not 
terribly kind will assume a position of power (perhaps only briefly, 
perhaps not).  At that point the only protection the Community will have 
is the licensing, and the clarity of the licensing.  That, after all, is 
the entire reason for the GPL to begin with.

You may find the above scenerio unlikely, but the free software 
community is repleate with examples of projects being taken over by 
people with an agenda at odds with the user community, with project 
heads changing their minds (or their personalities, over time) and the 
resulting, sometimes toxic, conflicts.  The GPL has protected the user 
and developer communities in these cases because such issues were 
addressed ahead of time, by clear licensing parameters.

>  By placing something into the
>public domain (by including it in a GPL'd program), one had made it next
>to impossible to sue for damages base on intellectual property rights. 
>
That is absolutely wrong, and did I not know better, I would suspect you 
of deliberately spreading anti-GPL FUD.

First, releasing a work under the GPL DOES NOT PLACE IT IN THE PUBLIC 
DOMAIN.  Let me repeat that.
Releasing a work under the GP does not place it in the public domain.  
Neither does releasing it under a Creative Commons License (except, of 
course, the one Creative Commons license that EXPLICITLY states the work 
is public domain), nor any other permissive license.

Nor does placing one's work under the GPL make it difficult or 
impossible to sue.  Anyone violating the provisions of the GPL may be 
sued, as SCO is finding out to its dismay right now.  Indeed, the GPL is 
so solidly written that numerous corporate violators (including CISCO) 
have, after speaking with counsel, agreed to abide by the GPL rather 
than face a court fight against the copyright holder.  This despite the 
fact that the offendors in these cases have had much greater wealth and 
a legal team to go up against the FSF (in some cases) and individuals on 
a limited budget in others.

> At
>the very least, suzanne should come up with a copyright notice to advise
>that suzanne was not covered by the program license.
>
Linus Torvalds once made an exception to the GPL for binary-only device 
drivers linking to the Linux kernel (I believe he has since recinded 
this exception, but I'm not sure as I don't follow it all that closely 
anymore).  A similiar clause, spelling out that GPL (and any other) 
license restrictions do not propogate into any gray areas with respect 
to creative works created with Blender should, as Ton suggested, be 
included in the copyright notice.  Suzanne could be mentioned as an 
explicit example of this, to illustrate the limits intended (the GPL is 
to apply to CODE, not animations and images created with that code, or 
.blends presumably).

Something should be done to put this to rest.  Simply assuming it won't 
be a problem is a mistake, as many other projects have discovered.  
Some, like KDE, resolved those issues, others, like Povray, are doing a 
complete rewrite in no small part because the licensing issues are 
unresolvable otherwise.

regards,

Jean.