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Comment by mdbco | Hacker News Reader

It looks like the corresponding author of this article (Didier Raoult) is also the Editor-in-Chief of the the journal (Clinical Microbiology and Infection), so it seems entirely possible that he might have relicensed the article to Elsevier when the journal moved over there from Wiley. This would be permitted, since Creative Commons does allow for dual licensing.

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In the case of the author licensing his work, he may license it in any way he wants, to as many entities as he wants and the licenses don't care and cannot disallow this.

Your comment reminds me of the people who complain that a software author released some code under GPL, then produced a second project based on their own GPL'd code without releasing the source of the second project.

> In the case of the author licensing his work, he may license it in any way he wants, to as many entities as he wants and the licenses don't care and cannot disallow this.

Actually, its quite possible for licenses (though probably not gratuitous licenses) to disallow this; a license can, for instance, by its terms be either completely exclusive or include some exclusionary provisions. In fact, such licenses are very important in quite a wide range of business scenarios.

> Actually, its quite possible for licenses (though probably not gratuitous licenses) to disallow this;

No, it's not. Licenses do not restrict rights of the copyright holder, ever. They are a (conditional) usage license for people that are NOT the copyright holder.

EDIT: Yes, if the author is no longer the copyright holder, then this can occur - but this would certainly be a very strange and misleading way to describe that scenario.

> No, it's not. Licenses do not restrict rights of the copyright holder, ever.

Sure they can. You can definitely give someone an exclusive license, typically for a set period of time. You have agreed by contract not to license to anyone else, even though you are still the copyright holder. A license is simply a kind of contract, and you can contractually agree to whatever you want -- unless restricted by law otherwise, and there are certainly restrictions on legal contracts, but exclusive licenses are not at all unusual and entirely legal. Presumably you were compensated adequately for giving up (usually temporarily) the ability to license to anyone else.

Of course, open source styles of licenses including CC, are never exclusive, because this sort of license is offered to the public at large. When you CC-license, or GPL-license, or apache-license your work, you're are offering the work to the public at large under that license, that's what those kinds of licenses are for.

But traditional licenses are usually offered to a particular party, and they certainly can be exclusive.

If only the owner of the copyright can claim infringement (as is the case in the US), then the point is moot. Is J. Doe going to sue herself for violating a license by releasing under another license?

One can contractually agree to make some else the exclusive source for something while retaining the copyright. In which case, if you then offer it to someone else then that "exclusive" party can sue you for breach of contract. Of course this has nothing to do with any of the open source or CC licenses.

Now we're off into contract law instead of copyright law.

Licenses are contracts. That's what a license is.

> If only the owner of the copyright can claim infringement (as is the case in the US), then the point is moot.

An exclusive license is a transfer of those rights under copyright to which it is exclusive from the licensor to the licensee. So the licensee would be, for the rights in question, the copyright holder, even if they were not the creator and the holder of the remainder of rights under copyright (see 17 USC Sec. 101, 201).

Right. The "owner of the copyright" doesn't have to be the original author.

Kind of. More that individual rights can have ownership transferred too, separately from each other and the original copyright, and any owner of the rights can claim infringement of the rights they own.

It's also almost certain that somewhere in Elsevier's terms, they require a copyright license, and require the same of their member journals, which would mean by accepting any member journal's fine-print guidelines for publication, the authors granted a separate license to Elsevier to propagate, store, and resell the content. IANAL but I'd assume that Elsevier's lawyers aren't stupid.

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