[copyleft-next] Limited-term copyleft

"Claes Wallin (韋嘉誠)" clacke+gmail at lysator.liu.se
Sat Feb 16 17:42:13 UTC 2013


On 2013-02-16 23:19, Angelos Oikonomopoulos wrote:
> On 16/02/2013 06:41 πμ, "Claes Wallin (韋嘉誠)" wrote:
>> On 2013-02-16 10:38, Richard Fontana wrote:
>>> On Thu, Feb 14, 2013 at 06:53:51AM +0100, Kuno Woudt wrote:
>>>> On 02/14/2013 04:40 AM, Richard Fontana wrote:
>>
>>>>> The idea would be to have the copyleft terms disappear after some
>>>>> limited period far short of the statutory copyright term.
>>>>
>>>> The only reason I can see for wanting this is to deal with copyleft
>>>> license compatibility issues.  Which in my experience are not enough
>>>> of a problem to weaken the copyleft nature of the work in this way.
>>>
>>> Out of curiosity: If you were writing a new copyright statute to cover
>>> software, how long would you make the duration of copyright?
>>
>> Five, with the ability to extend with five more if registered and source
>> code placed in escrow for the public upon expiration.
>
> How would source code escrow work? The only setup I can think of
> involves you shipping a full (compiler and all) build system along with
> the source, them building the binary for you and you only being allowed
> to distribute the binaries that they have built. Doesn't sound very
> practical (or trustworthy). Maybe you had something else in mind?

The standard for the code in escrow would be the same as for the CCS of 
GPL'ed binaries shipped today. If the source code is not usable, the 
person who would have benefited from it can sue you for damages, in a 
similar way as copyright owners are today suing people who ship 
derivatives of their GPL'ed code without proper CCS.

-- 
    /c


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