Posted by: Anonymous Coward
on September 16, 2006 07:41 AM
Copyright is almost automatic in the US -- if you can be identified as the creator of something you can be assigned copyrights to it.
If you work creating closed source (proprietary) software then ownership of copyright is a business issue. Your employer will have a policy or contract describing work you produce that they claim ownership rights to.
If you have copyrights to an original piece of work, you can decide how to license it for public consumption, for the duration of your exclusive rights. That's what the GPL is: a license for distributing copyrighted material.
There is a lot of discussion about Public Domain and other licenses. Many argue that the existence of copyright is sufficient to protect software. It qualifies fo copyright, not patenting, by virtue of the fact that any time a program is executed much if not all of it is copied to memory, and reproduction typically involves a copy on magnetic or optical storage.
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Re:What about copyright?
Posted by: Anonymous Coward on September 16, 2006 07:41 AMIf you work creating closed source (proprietary) software then ownership of copyright is a business issue. Your employer will have a policy or contract describing work you produce that they claim ownership rights to.
If you have copyrights to an original piece of work, you can decide how to license it for public consumption, for the duration of your exclusive rights. That's what the GPL is: a license for distributing copyrighted material.
There is a lot of discussion about Public Domain and other licenses. Many argue that the existence of copyright is sufficient to protect software. It qualifies fo copyright, not patenting, by virtue of the fact that any time a program is executed much if not all of it is copied to memory, and reproduction typically involves a copy on magnetic or optical storage.
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