Klaus Knopper wrote:
True. German law distinguishes between "Urheberrecht" (the "right of authorship", which cannot be given away or transferred. The Author of a piece of work must always be stated, no matter what), and "Verwertungsrecht" (the "right of exploitation", to decide what to do with a piece of work). You can sell or transfer the latter, meaning, you can make a contract with someone who will sell and distribute your work, with or without sharing the profits with the of the original author(s). The english term "Copyright", as far as I know, means both together, the rights of authorship and the exploitation rights.
As far as I know, in English/US kind of country, there is no "right of authorship" but just the "right of exploitation". And in the anglo-saxon right, you give away everything you have and can not keep your "right of authorship".
This is of course an issue also for the GPL since the GPL is writen with US copyright law in mind. So it might not work very well in Europe.
I assume that the European author of a GPL software could say to somebody else (in Europe): "I refuse that you reuse my software for controling a Nuclear Bomb to attack Irak." (because this will attack my moral status of software writer if it is known that I develop software of mass destruction).
So it mean that as an European, or let's say German, you can not give away all your rightS. Of course this is against the freedom of free software if you start using your "right of authorship" against a software that you release under GPL.
At least in Germany, the right of authorship cannot be taken away from you. If you write a piece of software, you have the right of authorhip and must be mentioned as the author somewhere, no matter if you distribute or sell the software by yourself or a different person or company does this for you (an employer, for example).
Belgium is about the same, except that it is not clear for software. Software is having a separate copyright legislation that is not very explicit about "right of authorship" or "Droit moral de l'auteur" (where the normal copyright rules for "art" is explicit).
This could be considered as a loussy implementation of the Copyright Directive for software since other country did simply include software with the other kind of art.
So in belgium it is not clear wether or not "software" is "art" and if in the case "work for hire" if the "right of authorship" is maintained or not.
Of course all of this is not Knoppix specific, and we should let the FSF, FSF Europe, "FSF France" and "FSF Germany" think and talk about those issue.
And I am NOT a specialist!!! David GLAUDE _______________________________________________ debian-knoppix mailing list debian-knoppix@linuxtag.org http://mailman.linuxtag.org/mailman/listinfo/debian-knoppix