German Copyright Laws

[Sam Liddicott]

* Yaakov Nemoy wrote, On 03/08/06 14:24:
> 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.
>

I'm not a lawer. I explain how the GPL works according to my understanding.

Once the source is licensed under the GPL you must, authorized and on
behalf of the company, distribute the source to yourself personally or
someone else under the terms of that License. Perhaps upload to
sourceforge or make available on another website. Or email it to me.
You might then easily receive a personal copy (under the terms of the
GPL) from that source.

If the company then "withdraws the license", they actually decline to
further distribute the software to anyone else under that license;
however those who already have received it under the GPL license will be
able to distribute their copy according as the GPL (which they received
it under) permits.

Hence, to keep "it" "free" it must be licensed under the GPL to another
person who will keep "it" available under the GPL.

Sam