On 10/06/07, Philip Olson <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
On Jun 7, 2007, at 5:11 PM, Wez Furlong wrote: > Philip Olson wrote: >> 2. Discuss with the authors and IBM about transferring copyright > > You'll find this difficult, because there is no legal entity to > which to > transfer copyright. The PHP Documentation Group. http://php.net/manual/en/copyright
And the PHP Doc HOWTO points to: http://doc.php.net/php/dochowto/copyright.php. You can make an assertion that the PHP Documentation Group owns copyright over all of the contributions to the manual, but I think you'll find that the PHP Documentation Group, just like the PHP Group and the PEAR group, isn't a recognized legal entity and therefore cannot own any copyright. I'm not a lawyer, but I've been heavily involved with them in the past, and unless things have changed dramatically in the past year and a half, none of these groups have the status of a legal entity (at least, not in North America). Compare with the Apache Software Foundation: http://apache.org/foundation/ """Formerly known as the Apache Group, the Foundation has been incorporated as a membership-based, not-for-profit corporation in order to ensure that the Apache projects continue to exist beyond the participation of individual volunteers.""" If the PHP Documentation Group incorporated and became a formal corporation (501 c3 status or what have you) with a board of directors, bylaws, etc, then you could talk about having contributors assign copyright. But at the moment, all that you can ask is for contributors to license their contributions -- copyright stays with the contributors. I also think that you'll find the burden of proof for assigning copyright to an entity requires much more than just saying "It's written in the Doc HOWTO, somewhere." If you do incorporate the PHP Documentation Group as a formal corporation, you will have to obtain the agreement, in writing (email would probably be okay), from all of the contributors to assign their copyright over to the PHP Doc Group now that it is a recognized legal entity - and future contributions should include an explicit notice assigning copyright. This is a complex area, and decisions cannot be made with a full understanding of all the nuances. What is your goal, anyways? Are you just trying to avoid having to include credits for the contributing authors on a page-by-page basis, or do you really want to go through the intense process of incorporating the PHP Documentation Group so that it can own copyright over the documentation? And if the latter, what purpose would owning the copyright serve that is not served by the license that the contributors provide their contributions under? -- Dan Scott Laurentian University
