Re: The legality of wodim
On Sat, Nov 10, 2007 at 09:01:48PM +0100, Arnoud Engelfriet wrote:
> This is where the concept of moral rights comes from. US copyright
> law doesn't recognize moral rights (except for some limited cases
> like sculptures) but European author's rights are strong on
> moral rights.
>
> Regardless of who owns the copyright and regardless of the license,
> if you mutilate a work and harm the original maker's reputation,
> he has a cause of action for violation of his moral rights against you.
> This right cannot be waived, transferred or bought off.
I can't comment on the rest of Europe, but in the UK the two key moral
rights of an author are (i) the right to be identified as the author,
and (ii) the right to object to derogatory treatment of the work.
The UK law requires the right to be positively asserted by the author,
and also excludes computer programs - making the UK regime much more
restrictive than, say, the German system - but setting those points
aside I don't think a fork of a free software project would breach the
UK moral rights anyway.
The mere fact that someone forks "your" project is not "derogatory
treatment". If they put in lots of documentation explaining how
useless the original author was, or if they were to deliberately
release a "broken" version in order to discredit the author, or if
they removed the author's attribution, that might be a different
matter.
But if they simply fork the project under a new name, and keep the
insults to, say, a mailing list ;-), then it's hard to see how that
would constitute an infringement of moral rights. And if that *does*
constitute an infringement of moral rights then that would seem to
make moral rights at least as great a threat to software freedom as
software patents.
John
(TINLA)
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