GPL and Author law

[Rudy Gevaert]

On Tue, Jun 25, 2002 at 03:59:04PM +0200, Arnoud Galactus Engelfriet wrote:
> Rudy Gevaert wrote:
> > On Mon, Jun 24, 2002 at 12:25:47PM +0200, Loic Dachary wrote:
> > > Focusing on US law only would have defeated its international
> > > applicability.  It does not talk about moral rights because there is
> > > no need to.
> > 
> > Thanks to everyone who has replied to my question.  I haven't had the
> > time to read mr. Jaeger his paper (due to exams), but after reading the
> > thread can I say: when using the GPL you can still benefit from the
> > moral laws (appealing in your country)?
> 
> Yes, assuming your country's laws recognize moral rights in
> software. It is forbidden to require someone to give up his
> moral rights in the Netherlands and Belgium, at least the
> right to object to modifications that hurt your reputation
> as a coder.

(forgot group reply)

Yes indeed, only it seems that the GPL takes away the strength of the
moral rights one has.  Or not?  As given in your example:   

> No, you can't force them to stop using the webforum. You can
> stop them from advertising your webforum software as being
> written by a white supremacist coder, or from adding routines
> that automatically add racist remarks to what people say.
> 
> The standard is whether your reputation as author would be
> hurt or damaged by the actions the third party took. The fact
> that they're using your software doesn't generally hurt your
> reputation. Bundling your picture browsing software with a
> collection of Nazi propaganda pictures might.

Thus as a conclusion you can only react to action taken against your
reputation, but not in a code kind of way.

Thanks to everyone for their reactions.

I've got an exam about Industrial rights tomorrow :).

Rudy
-- 
Rudy Gevaert - rudy at zeus.rug.ac.be  - http://www.zeus.rug.ac.be  
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I'm a GNU/Linux advocate. Every action against my beliefs is useless

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                              - Ingrid Bergman (1917-1982)