[MUD-Dev2] [BIZ] Unauthorised Publishing of My Work

[Lachek Butalek]

On 3/15/07, David Johansson <johansson.david at gmail.com> wrote:
> When it comes to money, it gets foggier, and it is very different
> depending on nation, but they must _ALWAYS_ publish your name as the
> creator, no matter license files or whatnot. Just adding a copyright
> notice is not legally binding anywhere (except the US maybe?) - Your
> work is already protected if it reaches a certain degree of originality
> or creativity, The Droit de Paternite cannot be touched.

This is all news to me. The original BSD (or was it MIT?) license had
a clause that stated that the original author's name must be reprinted
whenever the code was replicated or altered. This clause caused a big
kerfuffle with the GPL people, due to their clause that "no further
restrictions [than the ones mentioned in GPL] may be applied to this
license". Since the attribution requirement was a restriction, the two
licenses were incompatible for some time, until the BSD license was
revised to remove the attribution clause.

I suppose the argument goes that,
a) All works have an inherent, default copyright claim by the author
unless it is specifically sworn off by the application of a "copyleft"
license of some kind, and
b) This default copyright claim includes attribution (by the "Droit de
Paternit?" argument).

The only reference I can find to Droit de Paternit? is as a "Moral
Right" in the Berne copyright treaty, which applies even when the work
is considered to be in the Public Domain. Moral Rights are not,
however, universally recognized - the U.S. does not recognize it, and
I'm not sure about Australia, where the book was published. Of course,
it helps that the website states that the author wishes to be
attributed - in a very specific way at that - but a "no-fault" could
still be argued since the source package does not list this clause,
and I find it unlikely that an actual court would award compensation
based on breaching of potentially unrecognized "Moral Rights" alone
since the code was already made available free of charge with no
explicit restrictions on commercial use.

I agree with Sean - I think you'd be technically correct to challenge
this abuse of your generosity, but I think it would be foolish to go
further than bringing it to the attention of the publisher and see
what comes of it. The amount of time, effort and money required to
challenge this in court is mind boggling.

Lachek