Thursday, March 27, 2014

[devxmkji] Implicit acceptance of Sharealike licenses

Does an author copying, modifying, and republishing work that was originally distributed under a Sharealike copyright license (Creative Commons, GNU GPL) implicitly mean the author has accepted the Sharealike terms, so the Free license applies to the derived work, regardless of what license the author may state on the derived work?

This probably still needs to be tested in court.  What has happened in GPL cases when a small amount of GPL code has been discovered within a very large published piece of statically linked code?  Do they always successfully force the release of the entire rest of the source code?

Sharealike could silently infect works several steps removed from the original work, catching later authors unaware, when they try to invoke strong copyright protections on their work.

Unlike source code, it may be difficult to remove and replace just the infringing portion of, say, a piece of literature.  And the infringing derived work is already out there to be further copied or derived, in contrast to code, in which only the binary has gotten published.

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