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Cake day: June 13th, 2023

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  • One other thing you may have to do if you have contributors who have also committed code is to get their permission to change the license as well, as the code they committed may still be under their copyright and not yours, and they can choose to allow their code to be relicensed or not. Some projects use a contributor release to reassign copyright for contributions for reasons like this, for instance. This is partly the reason why the Linux kernel has never changed to GPLv3 and still uses GPLv2 (and also because Linus just doesn’t like some provisions of the GPLv3) — it would be pretty much impossible to get everyone who contributed code to a project as large as the kernel to agree to a license change. Any code that couldn’t be changed would need to be extracted and rewritten, and that’s not going to happen given the sheer size of the code base.

    If you don’t have other contributors then you’re home free. You can’t retroactively change licenses to existing copies of the code that have been distributed, but you can change it going forward.


  • There’s also something in copyright law called moral rights which can’t be transferred, although they can be waived. It’s possible to retain moral rights even if you sell your music to someone, and moral rights allow you assert some control over your works where you think misuse of it would cause harm to your reputation, amongst other things. I’m not a copyright lawyer or anything, but I’ve dealt with a bit of this stuff through open source software licensing, and it’s come up a few times when I was transferring licenses from companies I used to work for. If they didn’t waive moral rights then that would perhaps be an avenue to prevent misuse, but again, an actual copyright lawyer would be able to better determine that.

    Edit to add: I did some reading on this and more rights are not quite a thing in the US, but it’s a thing in Canada and other Berne Convention countries, but the US does have something similar but separate from copyright. The US has moral rights in some states but not others, and they have something called the Visual Artists Rights Act of 1990 that intersects with the idea of moral rights but is more narrower than general moral rights and only covers certain visual arts. In any case, I still haven’t gotten my law degree since this morning, but the basic gist of it is that the US has a different spin on moral rights than I’m familiar with in Canada, so they’re not equivalent, but there still may be standing for such a move by a musical artist.