From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 From: Charles Duffy Subject: Re: Copyright/licensing info ? Date: Wed, 14 Dec 2005 14:53:07 -0600 Message-ID: References: <3583bc109a4e7faa0b772572c30d12d2@cl.cam.ac.uk> <20051214183542.GE8997@underhill.no-ip.org> <0acc2bd33a65a550663b2a15ddd08dee@cl.cam.ac.uk> <20051214193100.GA23925@underhill.no-ip.org> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1; format=flowed Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Return-path: In-Reply-To: <20051214193100.GA23925@underhill.no-ip.org> List-Unsubscribe: , List-Post: List-Help: List-Subscribe: , Sender: xen-devel-bounces@lists.xensource.com Errors-To: xen-devel-bounces@lists.xensource.com To: xen-devel@lists.xensource.com List-Id: xen-devel@lists.xenproject.org Sean Dague wrote: > In the US everything caries implicit copyright. To ensure that something > remains open source software, it needs to carry a license statement in that > file. An external file referencing headers saying "Those files are under > this license" isn't necessarily adequate. I'm not a lawyer, and to the extent that I've had formal legal training it focused on UCITA rather than intellectual property law, but I'm quite certain that the below is correct: The default case for a copyrighted work is that no license exists at all, and thus all the actions regulated by copyright are prohibited unless permission to take such actions is otherwise explicitly granted. Granting a license to make use of a work otherwise does *not* require that the license itself be referred to within the work -- the license grant could be in an *entirely separate contract* negotiated between the copyright holder and the licensee with no connection (in terms of being packaged together) whatsoever. Now, the copyright statement -- yes, you want that to be part of the same document. As for the license, however, I'm quite certain that it does not need to be the same document.