I have an inquiry into the UCSB IP official about jointly held copyrights. I am
awaiting a reply.
Having looked into it myself, it is clear that we can not assign copyright to
ecoinformatics.org. First, as an institution it does not have any legal
standing, and so can not hold a copyright. Second, each of us has contractual
obligations as employees of our respective universities that prevent most of us
from giving away the copyright. I have reviewed the copyright policies at UCSB,
UNM, and ASU. At UCSB and UNM, it is clear that the University holds the
copyright for the employee contributions. At UCSB, software that is distributed
freely requires only a UC Regents copyright notice along with the license. At
UNM, it was not clear what the requirements are, because they didn't distinguish
between commercial and non-commercial requirements. At ASU, the University seems
to have released all rights to "Academic software" to the creators, regardless
of their employment status (B-908 C.4.c), so Peter and Corinna own their
respective contributions and can assign them as they desire. In light of these
findings, I am anticipating using the following notice on all EML documents,
subject to the feedback I get from UCSB.
Any objections/comments?
Proposed copyright/license header for EML:
'$RCSfile: eml-access.xsd,v $'
Copyright: 1997-2002 Regents of the University of California,
University of New Mexico, and
Arizona State University
Sponsors: National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis,
University of California Santa Barbara
Long-Term Ecological Research Network Office,
University of New Mexico
Center for Environmental Studies, Arizona State University
Other funding: National Science Foundation (see README for details)
For Details: http://knb.ecoinformatics.org/
'$Author: jones $'
'$Date: 2002/05/10 00:04:26 $'
'$Revision: 1.32 $'
This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify
it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by
the Free Software Foundation; either version 2 of the License, or
(at your option) any later version.
This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful,
but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of
MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the
GNU General Public License for more details.
You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License
along with this program; if not, write to the Free Software
Foundation, Inc., 59 Temple Place, Suite 330, Boston, MA 02111-1307 USA