On 06/06/2011 10:54 AM, Shawn H Corey wrote: > On 11-06-06 10:50 AM, Guy Hulbert wrote: >> No. For the license terms, it is the publisher. The copyright holder >> is the author, by default. > > But the author often sells (or rents) the copyright to the publisher. > Copyrights are transferable. And it's who holds the copyright that can > set the licensing terms. or, a license from the copyright holder may grant the licensee the ability to grant sub-licenses. It's potentially a very big mess, which is why debian encourages packagers to try to document a license grant directly from the copyright holder. For much free software, the copyright holder is the original author. For some software (e.g. GNU projects) the original author has assigned the copyright to another party, so that other party becomes the copyright holder. Debian likes to track both the upstream authors and the copyright holders in debian/copyright. I'm unaware of a hard requirement that we track upstream authors (though it is certainly polite to do so); but aside from the possibility of a sub-licensing scheme, debian clearly needs to track the copyright holders, since it is from them that debian gets a license to use, modify, and redistribute the software. Given that the upstream author is most often the same entity as the copyright holder, it's not hard to see why they get conflated sometimes; but if we're trying to do the Right Thing, we need to be clear about which is which. --dkg
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