German Copyright Laws

[Yaakov Nemoy]

Hi all,

I'm looking for some simple legal advice before I have to speak to a
laywer about this.  I'm unfortunately not very familiar with the
German Copyright Laws, so this will be a bit difficult for me.

I'm working on a small project (for now) for an internship that, under
the terms of my contract, falls under the company's copyright.
Convincing them to make an open source (GPL v2) release will be no
problem, but I have a question about ensuring the future of my
project.  As the project will be open source, how can I make a copy
under German law?  If my firm decides to close up the source later, do
I have the rights to make a fork of the last open version?  More
importantly, who has the copyrights to the forked version?

I am looking for some joint copyright anyways, and if I am lucky, this
will be a non issue, but I'm looking for a backup plan just in case I
can't make a deal with them.

Thanks in advance,
Danke im Voraus,
Yaakov Nemoy