Not all countries have a similar idea of what copyright is. The French, for example, and at least some other European countries that followed their example, have the concept of non-transferrable authors rights, and these are often seperated from "commercial" rights. There may be other countries with even more unique madness on the issue, but certainly the US is not alone in strange, complicated legal, or contradictory concepts of copyright law. Most copyright law is homogenised internationally through the Bern convention, which most countries are signatories of. The GPL is generally thought to be consistent with the Bern convention concepts and application of copyright, as is copyright assignment.
However, keep in mind, that a "copyright" comment in a source file is not in itself a "copyright", just as stating in comments "copyright FSF" is not in itself a copyright assignment. I can add a copyright here, as in "Copyright (c) 2002 Jeff Bailey", but this does not nessisarly mean it is true. If somebody went to court over this email, the first question is does Jeff hold legal copyright. That is says so here is unimportant. If there is something I have signed, as a contract or notorized document, that Jeff can produce which says that I did this, that is something that would be legally accepted anywhere (at least in a Bern convention signatory country). On 1 Oct 2002, Thomas Bushnell, BSG wrote: > Jeff Bailey <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: > > > On Tue, Oct 01, 2002 at 08:00:45PM +0200, Ludovic Courths wrote: > > > > > Ok. I didn't expect the process to be this complicated actually. ;) > > > I thought that the top line of the files which says "copyright FSF" > > > would just be enough. > > > > The US legal system is ugly *and* evil, and they require us to fill > > out forms that legally give the FSF possesion of all the GNU code you > > write. > > This has nothing to do with the US legal system, but is the same > everywhere. > > > > _______________________________________________ > Help-hurd mailing list > [EMAIL PROTECTED] > http://mail.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/help-hurd > _______________________________________________ Help-hurd mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://mail.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/help-hurd
