[Foundation-l] Licensing interim update

[geni]

2009/2/10 Petr Kadlec <petr.kadlec at gmail.com>:
> Maybe the copyright laws are living in the wrong century…

In quite a few cases yes.

US and Israeli law are kinda okay and common law based systems tend to
work to an extent (partly because they are more open to what we would
call rule lawyering. Treating films as a series of photos is one
classic example). After that some sort of work some don't.

>According to
> the Czech copyright law, the abovementioned image (were it not public
> domain due to its age) could not be distributed on the Internet, even
> if the original author licensed it under a free license back then (if
> free licenses existed back then, of course), because Internet was not
> known at the time. Article 46, paragraph 2 of the Czech Copyright Act
> [1] forbids (expressis verbis) the author to grant authorization for
> *unknown future uses* in a license contract. There is no legal way (in
> the Czech Republic) you could permit distribution of your work in a
> hyper-sci-fi-virtual-reality-holograph-version that is gonna be
> invented ten years from now in a license you are granting now, free or
> not.

I've seen that concept in a few legal systems. I think it goes back to
the Napoleonic code rights of man thing. It makes sense to a degree
when technical advance is slow and you are worried about authors
getting ripped off but yes it has issues when new uses are invented
fairly constantly.

-- 
geni