[Sussex] GPL and copyright

[Paul Tansom]

I've just come across a curiosity (well, from my perspective anyway) of
the GPL. If you look at the gnu.org website page:

http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#AssignCopyright

you find the quote:

"Our lawyers have told us that to be in the best position to enforce the
GPL in court against violators, we should keep the copyright status of
the program as simple as possible. We do this by asking each contributor
to either assign the copyright on his contribution to the FSF, or
disclaim copyright on it and thus put it in the public domain."

OK, it makes sense that to keep things simple there is a single entity
owning copyright, but how can this work in practise? For example, I've
found this on a GPL project website (I'll remove the project details
since the specifics of the project are not the issue):

"Contributors agree to relinquish copyright to the [Project] Development
team.

Before any submission is accepted for the standard distribution, the
contributor is asked to hand over copyright to [persons name] and the
[employer]. While some people think this infringes on the rights of the
contributor, and goes against the philosophy of Open Source software, it
doesn't. First of all, no one is forcing contributors to assign
copyright to us -- if someone wants to maintain that control, their code
doesn't go into the standard distribution. Secondly, the [Project]
developers are only in a position to license and distribute code if they
legally own copyright."

So, take a simple examples:

o You work on two GPL projects and use a common section of code on each
- how can you assign copyright to both? Nope? Scuppered!

o You produce some software that you use for your own business and
customers, but that you publish under the GPL, you also use the same
code (it is GPL after all) in a GPL project - does it make sense to
assign copyright of code you use for your business (I'm thinking self
employed here, working for a larger company adds new complications no
doubt!) to a third party (whoever that is).

Is this practise common amongst GPL projects? Do they look to assign
copyright to the FSF or themselves (I note this project works with the
project leader and his employer, although I believe he has now moved
jobs, so what happens there I don't know!).

As I said, I can see the logic in the simplistic approach of defending
the GPL legally, but I can see all sorts of practical problems in
sharing code between projects - unless the FSF ends up building up a
massive ownership of copyright over just about every piece of GPL code
in existence!

As ever with the legal issues surrounding free software I'm finding it
tough to get my head around - the principle is simple, the practicality
in the corporate money driven society is not so :(

-- 
Paul Tansom | Aptanet Ltd. | http://www.aptanet.com/