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Re: Basic legal question: Publication of a fix to psgml


From: Andreas Röhler
Subject: Re: Basic legal question: Publication of a fix to psgml
Date: Thu, 04 Apr 2013 10:38:29 +0200
User-agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux i686; rv:17.0) Gecko/20130307 Thunderbird/17.0.4

Am 03.04.2013 19:04, schrieb B. T. Raven:
Die Wed Apr 03 2013 07:03:40 GMT-0500 (Central Daylight Time) Andreas
Röhler <andreas.roehler@easy-emacs.de> scripsit:

Am 03.04.2013 10:29, schrieb Bastien:
Hi Andreas,

Andreas Röhler <andreas.roehler@easy-emacs.de> writes:

CA, as we learned, is partly privately negotiated.

Not to my knowledge.


http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/emacs-devel/2013-04/msg00066.html

BTW experienced that proceeding already years ago, which is just polite
and correct as such.

The copyright assignment is signed by contributors.  I'm not aware of
any negociations, and I'd be surprised to learn that there are private
negociations.

To evaluate the legal state of different parts in Emacs wrt CA will
need one or more lawyers.

This suggests that the copyright status of Emacs is uncertain.

Law and legal stats differ in theory and reality.
In theory more laws define more cases and should provide more security.
In reality the realm of possible interpretation is expanded too.


I hope you understand it is quite a serious statement and requires
some evidence.

The copyright status for code in Org's code is very clear, and I think
this is also the case for the copyright status of the rest of Emacs.
I sometimes get impatient when I have to wait for the FSF Copyright
Clerk to handle new copyright assignments for a new contributor, but
I know he has a lot of work and he's doing a great job.


To know the copyright status as such --as assignments may differ-- you
must read assignment by assignment, evaluate and understand the diffs
correctly -
which is absurd as IMHO the whole CA arts.

BTW German law --Urheberrechtsgesetz-- for example declares non-valid
such copyright assignments - even if signed.
Will a US-court accept CA from a German, when german law declares CA
possible?

Your English is so good that I can't tell whether you are a native
speaker or not.

Thanks! FWIW ;)

 Did you mean to write "if (wenn) German law declares CA
IMpossible"?

yep, sorry, a typo.

I'm sure the FSF's lawyers know about the status of German
law, don't they?

Don't know. It was just an example. What about japanese or chinese law when 
negotiating with it citizens?
Just wanted to point at the costs and risks when entering that procedure.

In any case, donative assignments are so legally thorny
that any discussion of them should probably be limited to private
communication with RMS or between/among the FSF's lawyers in camera.


AS the GPL works, making a success story of free software, 
assignment-stubborness has a kind of tragic-comic.

Not being surprised that nastiness of legal stuff corresponds with a respective 
style of communication:

http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/bug-gnu-emacs/2013-03/msg00495.html

Anyway, as always in error too :)

Andreas

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