[LAD] students and copyright

[Arnold Krille]

Hi,

On Sunday 02 August 2009 14:25:19 Dave Phillips wrote:
> Just out of curiosity, how many participants in this discussion are
> copyright holders ? How many of you have published works under copyright ?

I didn't yet take part in the discussion. But I am a copyright-holder. Both 
private (GPL:) and work. And for the work (at a university, what a 
coincidence) we decided to add "publish as opensource" to the mission-
statement of the project. Because otherwise the lawyers of both paying 
institutes would have to fight a paperwar and think about possible sales and 
stuff (in a market of ~10 possible customers in europe that all have their own 
software written/in writing).

What I know is: If you didn't sign a contract and work on a project, the 
copyright is still yours and you can (re-)license your work as you like. If 
you sign a contract, it is standard that you give the employee exclusive 
rights to license and publish your work (you still have the original 
copyright, in german "urheberrecht" which they can't take away from you!). 
Some firms even go as far as also disallowing all our private programming 
because of possible espionage / knowledge-transfer. Which is okay, if you did 
sign a contract saying so...

So changing the license-holder in the source-files to say "university <bla>" is 
okay. Not listing the names of the authors/contributors is okay. Removing the 
names of the authors/contributors is certainly not (because it is a change of 
copyright). Especially if they didn't sign a contract.

And if the project is licensed under GPL, there is actually no reason to 
change entries of copyright-holders...

Have fun,

Arnold
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