"C. Scott Ananian" <cananian@lesser-magoo.lcs.mit.edu> writes:
> It's not impossible, but it's not clear to me that simply putting a
> CollabNet copyright notice is legally equivalent to signing the copyright
> over to CollabNet. According to U.S. copyright law (which I happen to
> know a fair bit about due to organizing for the Sklyarov), I retain
> copyright on the work even if no notice is attached. In this case I felt
> that leaving the CollabNet notice unchanged was misleading.
>
> And I have to admit to a desire to see my name *somewhere* on the code I
> wrote. I know the SVN policy about 'territoriality', but it still seems
> that, should I at some point drop off the list, it would be wise for
> someone later looking at the code to know who he can ask questions about
> it.
One issue at a time, here:
First, let CollabNet worry about the copyright, since the problem here
would be theirs not yours, if there is any problem. That is, either
your contribution of a file with a particular copyright notice is
binding on you, or it's not. If it's not, *you* don't have to worry
because you know what your intentions were, and if you ever had to
testify about who you intended to assign copyright to, you know what
you'd say. So if anyone ought to worry here, it would be CollabNet.
Therefore, if they're not worried, you shouldn't be either.
Second, your credit is safe for many reasons. The ChangeLogs are
matters of public record, and one can always run "cvs annotate" or
"svn blame" on the repository. In addition to all that, there are
scores of witnesses and email archives testifying to what you did. No
one has the power to make your contributions invisible. Nor (more
importantly) is there any way to make it appear that someone else did
the work.
A more general comment: copyright law isn't about protecting credit
anyway -- that's trademark law. Copyright is a transferable thing,
conferring on its holder the right to control who can and can't copy a
given work. Because it is transferable, there is no particular reason
to assume that a work's copyright holder is also its author.
Sometimes they are the same person, sometimes they are not.
People seem to be pretty good about distinguishing between these two
things. A publisher may hold the *copy*right on a given book, but no
one thinks that the corporation actually wrote it, right? :-)
So the credit accruing to your work is safe, and even fairly easy to
establish by anyone interested in doing so, such as (in your example)
a future bug-hunter in that area of the code.
-Karl
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Received on Sat Oct 21 14:36:37 2006