On Sun, Jun 06, 2004 at 11:29:42AM +1000, Andrew Bennetts wrote: > On Sun, Jun 06, 2004 at 11:08:17AM +1000, 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. > > This isn't true -- copyright law allows for joint ownership of copyright for > a work, i.e. both owners have full rights to copy the work under any licence > conditions they wish, independently of each other.
Who has standing in the event of infringement? See my other recent missive on the topic for more details of the issues involved. > OpenOffice.org appears to exactly this arrangement for its contributions: > see the FAQ entries about their Joint Copyright Assignment at > http://www.openoffice.org/FAQs/faq-licensing.html#jca1 Looks like the NetBeans FAQ, with more meat. In particular, I'd like to know their basis for it not being "legally necessary" to show copyright interest in a work. While it's true that all creative works automatically have copyright held by the author upon creation, this is a different issue. If I rip off something that has "(C) Sun Microsystems" on it, and get a letter from J. Random Hacker's landshark requesting cease and desist, I'm going to laugh at it (or, possibly, get my landshark to write a laughing letter back), unless there is a lot more evidence to it than that. Good revision control log messages will help there, but I wouldn't want to rely on that if I was trying to sue someone for wilful infringement. - Matt -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html
