"Nadav Har'El" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: > When someone sends you a patch for your free software project, without > stating anything about copyright, what does that mean? Is he keeping his > copyright and only letting you use it in the GPL software,
IANAL, but I think that by default the copyright is his. There is an international agreement called Berne Convention that says that once your "creative work" is "fixed" you automatically have the copyright on it and all the derivatives. You don't need to "claim" copyright. In the US (and UK, I think) it is customary to explicitly claim copyright (the US joined the Berne Convention relatively recently), so you see those copyright statements on various works. I think that in the US there is a difference w.r.t. damages and, most importantly, lawyers' fees for registered and unregistered works, so it is worth registering your copyright. Once again, IANAL, and I don't know what the actual practice is. Hmm, later this week I am going to attend another FOSS training course at work, given by an IP lawyer - I'll ask ;-). -- Oleg Goldshmidt | [EMAIL PROTECTED] | http://www.goldshmidt.org ================================================================= To unsubscribe, send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the word "unsubscribe" in the message body, e.g., run the command echo unsubscribe | mail [EMAIL PROTECTED]
