Suppose a piece of software is distributed under some permissive license, e.g. BSD. Now, I modify this software and want to distribute my derivative work. My questions:
- Who is the owner of the derivative? Is it the original author, the new author or there is joint ownership?
- Is a copyright notice (say under the original copyright) sufficient to establish the new ownership?
Best Answer
You own the copyright to the portion of the code that you modified.
The previous contributors own the copyright to the portions they created*
Joint ownership is a good way of looking at the copyright on the source code for the project. Keep in mind that copyright is separate from the license of the project. In this case, copyright is ownership of code. License is the rules others have to follow in order to use that code.
Yes, although it is not necessarily required under the Berne Convention.
The caveat to all of the above is that some projects may require you to assign copyright to the project before they'll accept your contribution in the main branch. This note from the US Copyright office discusses how copyright may be transferred to another.
Since it sounds like you're forking the project, there probably isn't any concern about the original project requesting copyright ownership of your modifications. I primarily wanted to point out that copyright can be transferred.