The inherent standard in court for copyright is ownership and control. The GPL negates your individual permissions. In addition, you revoke all rights to control distribution. Sure you can say that there is a copyright, but to me its like claiming ownership of air. Read the copyright restrictions that lawyers right for copyrighted work. They insist on 100% control of any and every alteration and permission on ALL distribution. The GPL is the opposite.
kb -----Original Message----- From: Ian Lance Taylor [mailto:ian@;airs.com] Sent: Thursday, October 24, 2002 2:00 PM To: Ken Brown Cc: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Re: Copyright "Ken Brown" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: > Lets deal with this one at a time. My first question is this-who does the > code belong to once it is GPL'ed? What entity, person, group, troll, > whoever owns the code? It belongs to the copyright holder. I've written free software myself. I own the copyright on that software, and the files are so labelled. I've put the software under the GPL. That doesn't mean that I don't own it. It just means that other people are permitted to do certain things with it. (This answer assumes the current intellectual property regime. It's possible to make a different answer philosophically, but practically speaking today the copyright holder owns the code.) Ian -- license-discuss archive is at http://crynwr.com/cgi-bin/ezmlm-cgi?3 -- license-discuss archive is at http://crynwr.com/cgi-bin/ezmlm-cgi?3