Re: Are Microsoft’s patent lawyers really this dumb?

[Kurt Häusler]

On Sun, 08 Jul 2007 12:24:38 +0200, David Kastrup wrote:

> Kurt Häusler <usenet@haeusler.NO.co.SPAM.nz> writes:

>> By leaving their name in the text of the gpl license file rather
>> than say overwriting it with either my name or my employer's
>> name. Which is standard practice right?
> 
> Sigh.  That makes the license remain copyrighted by the FSF, but does
> not affect your software.  Without an explicit transfer of copyright
> (and a legal step such as transfer of ownership requires _two_
> consenting parties and can't be done unilaterally by writing some
> stuff into a file), the copyright remains with the author.

Ahh that makes sense, now. I don't know why I was under that
misunderstanding for so long! I am sure I have seen other instances of
people putting their own name in the gpl.txt in order to claim copyright
over the software itself and maybe thats what confused me. I think I better
stick to either public domain or commercial licenses for now, at least
until I become a lawyer or able to afford one!