Look at SCO v IBM on Groklaw. Under American law, all copyright transfers MUST be clearly made IN WRITING.Our questions are these: 1. Does the above constitute a valid copyright transfer? Given the above, what is the copyright status of this project? Are the copyrights still held by individual contributors or are they (in your legal opinion) actually held by the maintainer?
An email which clearly says "I assign my copyright in this patch ..." is probably good enough, provided it's signed so you can prove it's not forged.
But remember, the legal presumption is that copyright is NEVER transferred unless it is clearly stated in writing. Any ambiguity and the transfer fails.
Cheers, Wol -- Anthony W. Youngman - wol at thewolery dot demon dot co dot uk HEX wondered how much he should tell the Wizards. He felt it would not be a good idea to burden them with too much input. Hex always thought of his reports as Lies-to-People. The Science of Discworld : (c) Terry Pratchett 1999