copyright assignment

[Andreas Pour]

Waldo Bastian wrote:
> 
> On Tuesday 26 November 2002 12:55, Andreas Pour wrote:
> > What would be nice though is to grant KDE eV the right to enforce a
> > copyright, or a license.
> 
> I don't think you need _all_ copyright holders in order to enforce a
> copyright, no? It's my understanding that every single copyright holder can
> start a legal action if (s)he is of the opinion that his copyrights are
> violated. So even if only a few people would assign the right to enforce
> their copyright to KDE eV, KDE eV would already be in a reasonably strong
> position to take action.

Exactly :-).  Anyone who has contributed code would have their copyright
violated so could take action.  And if an assignment of the right to enforce is
valid (which it could be in the US but I'm not sure about Germany / other
places) then the fact that not all contributors can be found would not preclude
KDE eV protecting the code.

Of course w/out all contributors assigning rights to KDE eV (such as the right
to relicense the code under an "Appropriate Free License" (appropriately
defined) if the governing license is invalidated but not for other reasons -
essentially giving KDE eV a BSD-type license but more restricted through the
"Appropriate Free License" provision) the problem of the license being held
invalid is not addressed.

Ciao,

Dre