Copyright and License

[Francis Glassborow]

In article <slrn8hdleh.2f8.cjc26 at localhost.mindriot.net>, Cliff Crawford
<cjc26 at nospam.cornell.edu> writes
>I don't really have the time or the legal expertise to sit down and read
>copyright laws, and there's so many different interpretations of the GPL
>that I'm wary of using that too.  So I just slap a BSD license on
>everything and hope for the best :)  I think I'll look more into PD
>though, it sounds like it's not as dangerous as I thought it was.

And it wouldn't really help because they are not universal.  Actually, I
believe that in the US you cannot give away your copyright, you can sell
it, and if you work for a company ownership of the copyright on your
work may belong to the company as part of your work contract.
Intellectual property belongs to the creator unless they sell it in some
way.

Patents are even worse (I believe that owing to the differences between
the US and Europe that two unrelated people can hold the sole patent to
a product, one in Europe and one in the US - the US gives preference to
the first to file while Europe uses a different criterion)


Francis Glassborow      Association of C & C++ Users
64 Southfield Rd
Oxford OX4 1PA          +44(0)1865 246490
All opinions are mine and do not represent those of any organisation