As a german citizen I'll try you explain my understanding of my
countries law. The basic concept should be similar within central Europe
(Austria, France, Italy, Spain ... but not Great Britain) as most
countries laws evolved from the Roman law . Sorry i am not a lawyer,
just a programmer concerned with this question while living from his
work but also giving parts of this work back to the community.
We have two different parts. One is called 'Urheberrecht' (right of
author) and the other "Entscheidungs-" and/or "Verwertungsrecht" (right
to decide of usage and right to use) .
First one just handles the mental ownership of a piece of work. This
can not be given to another party. In many cases this is worth nothing
as is just bundles your name with your work. Very often this right is
incorrectly translated as Copyright even in European countries.
Second one handles the commercial and economical aspects. Of cause this
is something total different. If you get paid for your work, you
sometimes loose this rights to your customer or employer immediatly.
If you still have this rights by your own you are able to
give/license/sell them like every material thing.
As I unterstand the american way the customer or employer get the
unrestricted usage rights under almost all circumstances. Additionally
the author seems to have no right to be mentioned at all.
Do not worry in casse an author tells you he gives you the right to use,
to decide how to use AND(!!!) the right to modify it. You have all
neccessary rights, except to remove the authors name (if it was there
before!!!). Although this is just for the authors reputation/prestige
even big companies have been accuessed to put back the name, to pay for
unauthorized removal or stop usage immediatly.
Once again note, in Germany the right to modify code does not include
removing the authors name.
Now most germans seems to accept the common GPL and BSD like copyrights.
But I have problems understanding many restrictions/variatons of
proprietary copyrights and just do not accept and use them.
In cases german citizens accepted a foreign license model ot contribute
software, it would be nearly impossible to involve a German court
whether for license nor for warranty aspects.
Stefan Finzel
D. Richard Hipp wrote:
On Fri, 2005-06-03 at 21:01 +0200, Andreas Rottmann wrote:
There is
no such thing as "disclaiming copyright" in Europe (or at least
Germany and Austria).
Rotty
This would be a problem for any citizen of Germany or Austria
that wanted to contribute code to the SQLite project. I cannot
see that this would ever be a problem for an SQLite users.
Can citizens of Germany and Austria assign their copyright interest
to third parties? If so, then if you want to contribute code to
SQLite, just assign the copyright to me and I will then dedicate
the code to the public domain, which I can do since I am not a
citizen of Austria or Germany. If citizens of Germany and Austria
are not allowed to assign copyright, then you will not be allowed
to contribute code to SQLite regardless of what license SQLite uses.
Either way, the fact that SQLite has been dedicated to the public
domain seems unimportant.
