On Sun, Jun 06, 2004, Matthew Palmer wrote: > From my understanding, there can only be one copyright holder over a > specific creative work. When two or more entities both claim > copyright over a work, they're actually claiming rights over different > parts of the work. Identifying whose parts are whose isn't always > possible, but that's not an issue in the case under discussion.
Many many FOSS projects with commericial partners are pioneering "Joint Copyright Agreements", see for example: http://www.netbeans.org/about/legal/jca.html Many open source projects, including the Free Software Foundation, Red Hat and OpenOffice.org require that contributors assign their copyright when they contribute code. Sun, the NetBeans project sponsor, has come up with an innovative Joint Copyright Assignment ("JCA") that allows contributors to retain their own copyright while sharing a joint copyright interest in the contributed code. This way contributors retain all the rights granted by copyright law while sharing those rights with the open source project sponsor so that the code is protected by both the Sun Public License ("SPL") and copyright law. -Mary -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html
