Various updates to the handbook

Joerg Sonnenberger joerg at britannica.bec.de
Tue Aug 15 11:55:47 PDT 2006


On Tue, Aug 15, 2006 at 07:45:45PM +0200, Erik Wikström wrote:
> Just realized that there's a problem with this. According to Swedish 
> copyright law (don't know about US but I think this is compatible with 
> international copyright law) the copyright belongs to the person who did 
> the last modification. i.e. the copyright of the original belongs to the 
> FreeBSD documentation project, but when you modify a page the copyright 
> of the modified page belongs to DragonFly (or whomever).

This is not exactly true. The Berne convention distinguishes between two
kinds of copyrights in this situation:
- the individual contribution (the part you wrote)
- the collection (the handbook or a specific part of it)

The first part has a fixed owner, it doesn't change when someone else
modifies the handbook. The second part is a bit different though. The
copyright is the sum of all contributors and to simplify the licensing,
e.g. written forms like the FSF is using are common. So, yes the FreeBSD
copyright should be included and a DragonFly copyright be added.

Joerg







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