On Mon, Apr 27, 2009 at 11:35 AM, Shaun McCance <[email protected]> wrote: > On Mon, 2009-04-27 at 14:35 +0100, Matthew East wrote: >> Hi Luis, >> >> On Mon, Apr 27, 2009 at 2:06 PM, Luis Villa <[email protected]> wrote: >> > "A transfer of copyright ownership ... is not valid unless an >> > instrument of conveyance, or a note or memorandum of the transfer, is >> > in writing and signed by the owner of the rights conveyed or such >> > owner's duly authorized agent."[1] >> > >> > UK law has a similar provision (UK Copyright, Design and Patents Act >> > 1988, s. 90(3).) >> >> Interesting - that would appear to put a block on the idea. However it >> would be interesting to pursue the question of whether submitting >> patches or pushing to a revision control system could be considered a >> signature. >> >> Apart from anything else, if this is not possible, then it is probably >> be necessary to rethink the current copyright declarations of the user >> guide, which seem to purport that the copyright holders are Sun >> Microsystems and Shaun, respectively. > > This is an unfortunate effect of us not being vigilant in > ensuring contributors add copyright elements to the DocBook > files. I don't know the legal ramifications of copyright > holders not stating their copyright in the document.
Under US law, they lose certain presumptions which would make it harder to win a court case (mostly because it is harder to *prove* it is theirs.) But it is still theirs, so both legally and morally they're still on the high ground. Luis _______________________________________________ gnome-doc-list mailing list [email protected] http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/gnome-doc-list
