Copyright Law

Once it is out is it out?

By Peter Moldave

According to a blog hosted by Simon Simonov, last year, Google made available some software on Google Code under an Apache license. The code disappeared from Google Code shortly afterwards. However, someone downloaded it before it disappeared, so the question would be if they continue to be licensed?  In general, open source licenses are irrevocable, so they should be. But…if it was distributed under the Apache 2.0 license, there are two interesting clause in the definition of “Licensor” and “Contribution” that may come into play:

“Licensor” shall mean the copyright owner or entity authorized by the copyright owner that is granting the License.

“Contribution” shall mean any work of authorship, including the original version of the Work and any modifications or additions to that Work or Derivative Works thereof, that is intentionally submitted to Licensor for inclusion in the Work by the copyright owner or by an individual or Legal Entity authorized to submit on behalf of the copyright owner.

Question: did Google (the company, the owner) grant the license or “intentionally submit” the materials? If an individual employee posts code under a license, and that individual is not a corporate officer (or authorized by a corporate office), there is always a questions of authorization; the Apache license makes that explicit — and therefore unclear. On the other hand, this does not seem like a good thing for Google to have done if they intended to keep the code proprietary…

Full post as published by OpenSourceLegal on March 12, 2007 (boomark / email).