Re: [LAD] students and copyright

Hi, On Sunday 02 August 2009 14:25:19 Dave Phillips wrote: 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