Re: [LAD] students and copyright

On Sun, 2009-08-02 at 13:31 +0200, Ralf Mardorf wrote:

> Referring to the copyleft statements by Stallman and the FSF you can
> have a copyright by FLOSS, by GNU, but not by the GPL itself. The
> institute might have a copyright for the software's name and the logos,
> but each coder has to copyleft his changes on GPL code.

I have no idea what you mean with copyright "by FLOSS, by GNU, by GPL".

On a name or logo would be trademark, not copyright.

> Students or developers for proprietary companies that don't use GPL code
> might lost the copyright for their intellectual property because of
> contracts. What ever I have done for Brauner microphones when I worked
> for him, is owned by Brauner and not by me. I was paid to do it, even if
> I was disproportional bad paid. Students won't get money, but the
> universities might have contracts with the students, resp. with
> proprietary companies that cooperate with universities, so they might
> have to pay less college tuitions.
>
> For the GPL there only seems to be one way. The coder needs to keep the
> original author and to add his name and the date when he changed GPL
> code and if he writes complete new code, he needs to add his name and
> need it to do by matching to GPL versions of GPL code done by other
> authors, that is included to his project. No institute can take on a
> copyright, while the institute is using GPL licensed code.
>
> I don't understand the GPL, but this is repeated and repeated by
> Stallman and the FSF. I don't think, that I'm mistaken, but I might be
> wrong.

I don't see how that would work out. It's up to the copyright holder to
license the software as GPL. AFAIK, you can give away your copyright on
your works in some jurisdictions, including the US. That means you can
sell it or give it away and there can be clauses to that extent in
contracts.

This might be more complicated in countries such as Germany, where
citizens are not legally able to give up their copyright. But I guess
you can still grant someone else all rights, irrevocably, just not
exclusively.

Copyleft/GPL build on copyright. It's the lever to do anything.

Of course you have to keep all names of people that didn't hand over
copyright to you in.

-- 
Thorsten Wilms
thorwil's design for free software:
http://thorwil.wordpress.com/
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