On 16/11/2013 12:09, Paul Wise wrote:
> Hmm, you seem to be saying that the individuals who wrote the code still own
> copyright on that code but as far as I can tell, ignoring the embedded code
> copies of external projects, the headers in the code mostly say Copyright
> POV-Ray Ltd. There are some files with no copyright/license header and some with
> additional copyright holders though but most of the codebase appears to be owned
> by POV-Ray Ltd.

I'll clarify things a little here: as Christoph said, we did contact
past contributors and ask for assignments. They had the option of
licensing the code to us under the dual license as mentioned, or
alternately assigning joint or full ownership of the code. As a result
of this the POV Ltd. owns (or has the same rights as an owner over)
most of the code in POV-Ray.

That aside, saying 'Copyright' in a file does not (as I understand it)
necessarily imply exclusive ownership of the code it refers to by the
party claiming copyright.

Let's take a hypothetical example: if I were to generate a derivative
work from a source that allows generation of derived works, then I
have copyright over that derived work. This is pretty standard in
copyright laws, and thus I would have the right to place my own
copyright notice within the file containing that work.

If the original work from which I derived the above example did not
require attribution or inclusion of their own copyright/license
notice, then I would not be required to include it. This does not
however mean that I own the original work from which the work was
derived. (It also does not mean I would not include attribution; just
that it's up to me).

-- Chris

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