What you mean is the Berne convention, http://www.law.cornell.edu/treaties/berne/overview.html
Yeah, that looks like it.
Actually, AFAIK, you cannot surrender your rights to the work. No matter what you sign away, you are still the author. However, you may sign away rights for distribution and use of the work.
Good point. I'm pretty loose with my language which is why I'm not a lawyer I guess.
Yep, copyright is a tricky thing. That is exactly why FSF is asking people contributing to the GNU project to assign copyright to them - so that they do not have to chase down every single contributor who may own a piece of code even though there is no explicit copyright notice on it in case of a lawsuit or something similar. E.g. Linux kernel development now requires that you actually have your code vetted by somebody and signed off + you need to certify that it is you who wrote it (and not submitting something you may not have the rights for) - this came after the SCO lawsuit started.
Yeah, good point I forgot about this. But I've always been told (not by lawyers) that assigning the copyright to the FSF is not so much for relicensing issues like we're talking about, but for defending copyrights in court. My understanding is that if SCO were to violate my copyright on some code I wrote, by default, only I could sue SCO for copyright infringement. Nobody else (IBM, FSF) could sue because they have no claim to damages. If I assign my copyright to FSF, then they have a claim and can sue. I'm not sure what FSF can do about relicensing in this case. Seems like they could on the surface, but that sounds ugly too. Imagine if they went anti-free software and relicensed everything under some evil license. -Eric _______________________________________________ osg-users mailing list [email protected] http://openscenegraph.net/mailman/listinfo/osg-users http://www.openscenegraph.org/
