Re: GFDL and Anonymity --- another problem?
On Thursday, Oct 9, 2003, at 11:49 US/Eastern, Mathieu Roy wrote:
A license is valid because there is a known copyright holder that
explicitely said that his work can be distributed under this license.
So I wonder how it would be possible for a license to be valid with an
anonymous copyright holder.
I'd think so. Certainly the copyright is valid, and people can and do
release, e.g., books under pseudonyms.
If nothing else, at least the GPL allows me to put my changes in the
public domain and still distribute them.
The copyright holder can be an individual or a group, but in any case
an entity recognized by the law.
Sure. But he doesn't have to identify himself, and certainly not by his
actual name.
Please, take a look a the section "How to Apply These Terms to Your
New Programs" of the GPLv2.
I'm talking about modifications to a program, not an original program,
so this isn't quite relevant, but...
one line to give the program's name and an idea of what it
does.
Copyright (C) yyyy name of author
The only effect of leaving off the proper copyright notice (in the US,
at least) would be that people could more easily claim innocent (did
not know work was under copyright) infringement.
Also add information on how to contact you by electronic and
paper mail.
Electronic mail can be fairly (or even completely) anonymous; and
personally, I've never added a postal address to my GPL notices. I
doubt it really matters.
I would not be surprised if in many countries software with no author
is in fact a proprietary software.
I have no idea, though I don't see why that would be the case. It could
just be that I'm a little biased by the US's --- and, indeed, the
Internet's --- tradition of anonymous and pseudonymous works.
[Funny to see how some people here are more interested in finding new
issues before making any constructive proposal to fix the existing
ones]
This is quite a low blow. I'd like to remind you that I was (and still
am) willing to work on the committee that is working to rectify the
GFDL; however, there are currently no open positions.
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