Re: non-exclusive grant == no enforceability? (fwd)

[kelly poverty bloomington in us]

On Tue, 22 Aug 2000 12:24:23 -0700 (PDT), Brian Behlendorf <brian@collab.net> said:

>So I forwarded Kelly's comment on this topic to the apache.org board
>for commentary, got this response from Roy, and thought I'd pass it
>back here.  Roy asked me to relay that he doesn't have time to get
>involved in a debate, as his dissertation is due in two weeks.  =)

Roy's comments are on point and accurate as far as I can tell,
although he forgets that the owner (or exclusive licensee) of a
registered copyright can claim statutory damages in lieu of actual
damages, and in any case declaratory and injunctive relief would be
available even if legal relief was not.  But that's a minor issue, and 
in any case I doubt many GPL licensed projects bother to register
their copyrights.

>Roy's last comment indicate something that perhaps was forgotten;
>what's the state of a contribution when being checked into a
>gnome.org CVS tree?  Is it at that point still (C) the individual,
>the Gnome Foundation, an aggregate, etc?  That's different than the
>situation where someone writes something in isolation and then
>donates it.

It is my belief that the act of checking works into CVS has no effect
on the ownership of the copyrights of those work.  CVS is a "library"
and the act of depositing a copy of one's works in a library has no
effect on the ownership of the copyright.  

Kelly