[Gllug] GPL

[Jason Clifford]

On Wed, 21 Jul 2004, Leigh Mason wrote:

> Having read the GNU GPL I'm a little unclear as who retains the intellectual
> property rights of a particular work? As I understand it, the original
> author can copyright their work by providing a copyright notice. If a
> recipient of that work decides to change it in any way, are they then the
> copyright holder for that version? Or are all intellectual property rights
> completely removed?

Firstly you need to understand that copyright in an original work exists 
the moment that the work is created. Providing a "copyright notice" is not 
necessary. This is under English law however it holds true for most legal 
jurisdictions too.

Where someone in receipt of a copyright protected work makes changes to it 
the ownership of the copyright does not change. Where those changes are 
substantial the author of them will hold copyright over his/her changes 
and if they are incorporated into the distribution of the work without 
assigning that copyright to the author of the original work the author of 
the changes will have some copyright in the whole. Note that the changes 
must be substantial for this to be the case. Where the changes are not 
substantial the author will not gain any copyright in the whole work.

The GPL is unaffected by any of this albeit that the license mandates that 
changes made to the software shall only be distributed under the GPL 
license - where the changes are not distrubuted there is no need to place 
them under GPL.

You might want to carefully consider whether the use of the term 
"intellectual property" is helpful. Copyright, trademarks and patents are 
very different areas of law and bundling them together under the title 
"intellectual propert" can lead to false impressions and 
misunderstandings.

Jason Clifford
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