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Comment by belorn | Hacker News Reader

The more I think about it, the legal distinction between editing author and co-author seems very dangerous. With more than 15.000 developers, having one case for each developer and establishing exactly what lines and changes they personally added and from there how the defendant used those lines and what damages the plaintiff should get seems like a unrealistic amount of work and weight put on the legal system. It would force every copyright case involving large project to be made into class action law suits, which is not an option in Germany.

A lot of recent (last 10 years) in FOSS legal discussion seems to have concluded that personal copyright is the best practice. Every developer with substantially contribution can defend the project in their local legal system. This case seems to imply that we should abandon this practice and return to copyright assignment so that a single legal entity can claim in court to be the legal owner of the complete work.

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I believe e the article’s emphasis of this point may be overstating its relevance: the editor’s copyright claim in a derivative work is identical to that of an author. The former’s only distinction is that reproduction requires consent from both the original author and the editor.

I believe the real issue may be more of the delianation between different “works”. I. e. is the Linux kernel a singular work, allowing anyone who contributed significantly to claim copyright protection on the whole, or does the plaintiff in this case only have a claim to the specific module they contributed to.

In any case, this was only about the injunction, and the plaintiff’s case probably suffered most from being overly broad. It appears that the missing distinction between versions the plaintiff may or may not have contributed to was also relevant to making a withdrawal the better option, tactically.

As to that motivation, it may be interesting to note that court fees and costs for lawyers differ significantly if a judge ends the procedure with a written ruling vs voluntary withdrawal. I’ve personally seen judges advising the parties of the likely outcome if they were asked to rule, and strongly encouraging one side to think about withdrawing their motions.

> ...the legal distinction between editing author and co-author seems very dangerous.

It seems entirely reasonable to me. A pure reviewer (as opposed to a code contributor) has no copyright claim to the work because the reviewer didn't write it. The court wants to see evidence that the plaintiff does indeed have a copyright claim over the works he claimed he does.

> This case seems to imply that we should abandon this practice...

I don't think so. It simply demonstrates that one cannot bring a claim for copyleft license violation without actually having a copyright interest in the work, which is something we already knew.

Having a CLA/Copyright Assignment is IMO a bad choice, it might lead to less contributions to a project on part of developers not wanting to sign a CLA.

I think despite some drawbacks, the "everyone has their own" model is still better but needs some fixes. Probably in form of binding Contributor Guidelines.

ASF has a CLA for every single project, and seems to be doing alright. It also seems like what you call “binding Contributor Guidelines” is basically a CLA.

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