Re:Facebook’s Zuckerberg sues to force land sales
by belovedeagle on Thursday January 19, 2017 @01:07AM
(#13433464)
The article makes it clear that this is standard procedure in Hawaii. No new case law is being created.
Interestingly, there's a similar "dilution of ownership" in FOSS projects. Unless the project is operating under one of the nonprofits that foster/require copyright assignment for contribution, the IP of a FOSS project under a license like the GPL is effectively "owned" in part by every individual contributor. But each claim to the copyright of the work as a whole is very, very diluted.
If this petition went through, and the relevant case law were set, one could perhaps claim to be able to freely violate the GPL by creating a derivative commercial work, under the argument that because so many people each own so little of the project, nobody really owns it enough to be able to sue over it. (After all, nobody owns enough to be able to do other things requiring majority-ownership, like relicensing the project!)