AW: Copyright [cgf, please comment]

["Karl Philipp" <karl dot philipp at danet dot de>]

Hi Suhaib,

KPH> I am not sure about it.
KPH> The point of dispute is someone taking prior work and rewriting and
inserting his
KPH> copyright notice and authorship, intentionally omitting and refusing to
KPH> incorporate major part of existing work which points to that his work
is borrowed KPH> from others.  That is a copyright infringment itself.

I agree. This isn't okay.

KPH> I was willing to let it go and offered the compromise situation
KPH> that he chnges the authroship and copyright notice to DRAFT
KPH> ONLy. Looks like does not want.
KPH> Therefore I will not let this FAQ to be posted, period,
KPH> because it is borrowed work from others, suggestions from our users in
KPH> the mailing list and existing contributed work from others.

I agree, too.

This discussion is the reason for me, to read more about copyright, GPL etc.

In the last two hours I've read a lot of wpages about this difficult topic.

Of course, there are partly big differences in the copyright of the nations.

I think now, the most human (including me) have only an ambiguous
imagination,
what copyright is.

In U.S. there is a distinction between copyright and authorship, but not in
Germany,
IMO.

The german copyright says, if there are various co-workers of a work, every
co-worker
has a right to "co-copyright" (German: Miturheberschaft).
Okay, it is a litte bit simplified, ...

I can understand Harold, that he has bad feeling, that the copyright of the
faq
belongs to RedHat only.

My question regarding "The Cygwin/XFree86 FAQ"

 http://www.cygwin.com/xfree/faq.html

is:

 1. RedHat has the copyright to this faq, doesn't it?

 2. If so, has RedHat allowed any human the right to "recycling" of the faq
    (comparable with the GPL for source code)?

If you answer the first question with "yes" and the last question with "no",
I've a very bad feeling, too!

Sometimes I've observed, that a human X is developing the freeware xyz.
Many contributors send bug reports, suggestions, new ideas etc. After some
months or years Mr. X decides, oh, now my software xyz becomes shareware.
In my opinion this approach isn't really fair, because the development of
the
software, including the new version, has profited from the contributions of
the
users.

greetings

 Karl

---
Karl Philipp

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