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Subject: Re: Bitkeeper outrage, old and new
From: Xavier Bestel <xavier.bestel@free.fr>
To: Brad Hards <bhards@bigpond.net.au>
Cc: Daniel Berlin <dberlin@dberlin.org>, Robert Love <rml@tech9.net>,
       Ben Collins <bcollins@debian.org>, Jeff Garzik <jgarzik@pobox.com>,
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Le lun 21/10/2002 ? 00:51, Brad Hards a ?crit :
> -----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
> Hash: SHA1
> 
> On Mon, 21 Oct 2002 08:47, Daniel Berlin wrote:
> 
> > 2+ people having copyrights on something only occurs when you have
> > joint authorship (or rare partial transfers).
> > In this case, what we have is the a transfer of copyright from you, to
> > the FSF ("my entire right, title, and interest (including all rights
> > under copyright))"
> > It's like transferring rights to real property (in most countries, you
> > can view copyright as an object of property in trying to determine what
> > you can do with it)
> > When rights are transferred to another party, the original author
> > doesn't get any residual rights unless these are expressly reserved as
> > a "grant back".
> > You are no longer the owner of the copy right.
> Which is the whole point of the FSF copyright assignment. They don't want you 
> to relicense it under some other terms. Under the GPL it doesn't matter who 
> owns the copyright, so the only point of the copyright assignment is to 
> reduce _your_ rights.

But in the copyright assignment request, the FSF states:

"   However, upon thirty days` prior written notice, the Foundation
agrees to grant me non-exclusive rights to use the program as I see
fit; (and the Foundation shall also own similar non-exclusive rights)."

Doesn't this mean that the author still has copyrights on his work,
provided he tells the FSF within one month ?

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