|
|
|
| Authored by: Anonymous on Wednesday, October 03 2012 @ 01:43 PM EDT |
"Software, just as any other creative product, is copyrighted from the
moment it
is created with all rights reserved."
This is the traditional position. There was a time when word came from the
legal department where I worked and we had to check all source code files and
make sure that each and every one had a copyright statement. We were told that
this was required to protect the company trade secrets. At that time, the term
"intellectual property" was not widely used. It was explained to us
that the copyright was not enforceable for software unless the source code
declared the copyright.
I think that what the legal profession had decided was that the creator had the
exclusive authority to reserve rights under copyright law but without a
declaration of copyright, the presumption of the legal profession was that the
creator did not wish to exercise those rights. In this case, they decided that
to error on the side of the user over the interest of the creator was justified.
This amounts to a kind of "use it or loose it" argument.
I do not know where things stand now in the shifting sands of the legal
profession but the assumption we were to operate on as engineers is that
"copyright is not enforceable unless rights are specifically reserved by
declaration in the document in question." I have seen two answers to this
in open source: put a copyright statement at the top of all files, or put a
COPYRIGHT document in the top directory of the source code tree.
IANAL. The simplest copyright state reserves all rights but this is not
compatible with FOSS by itself. When source code is shared as FOSS then the
rights retained by each rights-holder needs to be clearly understood. Does the
original creator have rights over all modifications of his document? Do
copyrights aggregate to all contributors? Is there an explicit license stated
that manages these rights? You can see just as much confusion can be created by
how copyrights are declared as to the ambiguous condition where they were not
declared at all.[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]
|
|
|
|
|
