On Wed, 27 Mar 2002, Joachim Van der Auwera wrote: > I personally would never be prepared to transfer copyright. I would accept > not being able to get a fee for the work done, but copyright should always > stay with the author of the relevant piece of code! > In fact, if the code would later be sold (outside the QL community) I would > not accept my code being part of that if I do not get a part of the fee!
According to the Berne Convention, which regulates international copyright law, it's really simple... If you take someone else's work and modify it, the new work is a derivitive work, and the original author retains copyright. If you create something additional, which is not based on a prior work, you have copyright automatically, but you can surrender that copyright to the other of the larger work by accepting their license conditions. However, reality check, SMSQ is such a small seller that I doubt anyone would be able to justify suing even if there was a major infringement, or the lawyers would earn more than the entire income from SMSQ in even a very small lawsuit. Dave
