Re: Another Lilypond Story

[Anthony W. Youngman]

In message <address@hidden>, James 
Moore <address@hidden> writes
> If you own the copyright on a piece of intellectual property, you have the
> ability to grant a license to use it, in much the same way you can grant
> licenses to use any type of property that you own.
>
> This is from an American point of view - haven't the faintest idea what
> European/Asian/etc concepts look like.

Bearing in mind copyright is governed by the Berne Convention, it's 
pretty much the same the world over.

And something which seems to get a heck of a lot of people trying to 
grok the GPL (especially over dual-licencing), you need to understand 
that it is *impossible* to have both a copyright and a licence to the 
same thing.

If I own the copyright to a work, then I do *not* have a licence. If I 
have a licence, then obviously I do not own the copyright. Once you've 
grasped that fact, licensing should be a lot easier to understand - 
failure to grasp that seems to lie behind an awful lot of confusion over 
copyright.

Oh - it is possible to have both copyrights in and licences to a work, 
but only if it's a composite work, and for each bit of that work you 
only have one or the other - let's say three people composited the 
parts, one for each instrument, of Poulenc's sonata for trumpet, horn 
and trombone. If, as a trombonist, I did the trombone, then I would own 
the copyright in the trombone part, and have a licence to the other two 
parts (and to the entire work as a whole). But I *don't* have both a 
licence and a copyright applying to any single part of the work.

Cheers,
Wol
--
Anthony W. Youngman - wol at thewolery dot demon dot co dot uk
HEX wondered how much he should tell the Wizards. He felt it would not be a
good idea to burden them with too much input. Hex always thought of his reports
as Lies-to-People.
The Science of Discworld : (c) Terry Pratchett 1999