Re: copyrights assignments

[Martin Baulig <martin home-of-linux org>]

kelly@poverty.bloomington.in.us writes:

> On Sun, 23 Jul 2000 13:05:14 +0300, Ali Abdin <aliabdin@aucegypt.edu> said:
> 
> >Well - when I hack on something that has the copyright to someone
> >else (like Eazel Inc.) I 'assume' that by not adding myself I am
> >relinquishing my 'copyright' claims. Is this legal? or do papers need
> >to be signed (like the FSF do) ?
> 
> You do not relinquish your copyright merely by failing to notice it.
> In the US, at least, transfers of copyright must be expressed in
> writing and signed by the transferor.  Releasing a copyright to the
> public domain may have different requirements, but a contributor to a
> GPLed product cannot release a derivation to the public domain anyway
> (doing so is precluded by the GPL's licensure terms).

Hmm, and when I write "(C) 2000 some_name_here" or something like this
into a newly created source file (while having the copyright of that
file), is this a valid transfer of copyright or do you need to sign some
papers for it ?

Btw. what happens when someone's working contract says that the company
owns all copyrights of his code or something like this and this person
blindly writes something else into a source file without thinking ?

-- 
Martin Baulig
martin@gnome.org (private)
baulig@suse.de (work)