[thelist] Copyright ownership under LGPL

Mon Jun 14 23:01:13 CDT 2004

At 08:05 PM 6/14/2004, you wrote:
>1. Because you own the copyright you could effectively withdraw his use of
>the code at any time or increase charges to him based on that copy right so
>he feels "not in control"

You can grant license which is legally binding and cannot be withdrawn.

>3. Your client is one of the "cautious ones" and in this litigious world who
>can blame him/her. Unless your code is "pretty unique" it has probably all
>been done before and so would not stand up to the test of copyright. Example
>I put <html> tags on my html pages ...I hope the first person to do that
>doesn't sue me for breech of copyright. It could be argued the designers of
>PHP that the copyright of the standardly used php code they invented might
>belong to them.... So I am not even sure whether you have the right to sell
>the copyright. That would be my tack.... you have used standardised code and
>so you aren't entitled to sell the copyright for that as even though you
>typed it it isn't yours to sell and he wouldn't be the owner of it either.

Just because you combine elements that are in the public domain, does not 
mean that your work is not copyrightable.  I am under the impression that 
most code, that is not copied from elsewhere, is copyrightable.

Wes