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Joined: Thu Feb 13, 2003 10:52 pm
Posts: 9617
Location: Nashville, TN, USA
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(Evil and Chaos @ Jan. 23 2007,18:44)
QUOTE So the legal situation with the Chaos list is?
And those articles submitted to Fanatic Online and published there?
I would assume the same legal situation would apply (Which I assume is GW owns the material). Well, the terms of use for their websites state that any ideas posted there become property of GW but I think they'd be hard pressed to make that hold up in court if someone challenged it. It also would have absolutely no bearing on other venues like Tactical Command or Yahoo Groups where we've done a ton of development stuff. Joint IP could conceivably be the outcome.
Submission for publication is a more specific application. In that case, it is explicit, and it is an industry standard that submission includes assignment of copyrights. GW is probably clear on that regard.
However, there is a question about whether a person would really have the copyrights to assign. Generally, the person who creates a work has copyrights simply by the act of creating it but in the stuff we usually do, it's highly collaborative. That leads to questions of authorship.
As a theoretical, if you submitted the Krieg list to Fanatic, I might file a claim that I had a copyright in that work due to the contributions I made on this board. By submitting the work to Fanatic, you not only assigned the copyright, but you effectively attested that you were fully authorized to assign that right. If a court were to determine that I owned a 10% share in the copyright from our collaboration, you would owe me the theoretical commercial value of that 10% because you gave it away without my permission. I could also go after GW. In reality, they would simply sick a lawyer on it and produce the terms of submission that say that you attested to them that you owned full rights, but they would still have to pay the attorney to draft the document and show up in court. It would cost them money even though the suit would fail.
There is also a subtle but fundamental difference in the intellectual property laws of US v UK in regards to joint intellectual property. In the US, IP is an exclusionary right. Having the right doesn't guarantee that you can use the property. It guarantees that you can stop someone else from using it.* OTOH, in the UK, IP is an affirmative right, which means that you are definitely allowed to use the property. Obviously, if a joint property determination were made, the result would be problematic.
Going back to the "Neal's being an ass" example above, if it were ruled that we had joint IP, then in the UK you could assign your rights of use and GW could publish in the UK. However, in the US, my joint IP right means that I can prevent people from using it. That means that I can prevent you and, even though you assigned your rights to them, GW from publishing in the US.
I'm not sure about the approach of the rest of the EU, or other places that might be participating, like Australia or Japan. As you can see, it rapidly becomes complicated and complicated + law = lots of expense.
*If your reaction is like mine was upon learning this, you probably said "well, that's idiotic." However, when you get into the reasoning for each approach there are very valid points with respect to both protecting an individual's effort and promoting scientific progress either way.
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Neal
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