Joint ownership of copyright is a problem

Joint ownership of copyright is a problem

Posted Apr 20, 2005 14:13 UTC (Wed) by jamesh (subscriber, #1159)
In reply to: Joint ownership of copyright is a problem by utoddl
Parent article: Lack of developers delays OpenOffice.org (ComputerWorld)

> So Sun says Joe Thirdparty can't use the code you wrote, and you say
> he can. This puts you and Sun at legal odds, and suddenly the "nice
> thing" is not so nice anymore. In fact, it's just as if it belongs
> only to Sun 'cause they have more legal resources than JoeBuck has to
> draw on.

With joint copyright holders, either party can license the work without the consent of the other party. So if you give a license to Joe Thirdparty, Sun can't take them to court.

Of course, this would only apply to your own code -- not other people's contributions. It does put Sun in the unique position of being able to license OpenOffice as a whole though, which is the idea of the copyright assignment (like it or not).

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