OWNERSHIP OF INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY

 

Ownership of intellectual property is a complex, yet important challenge in open-source software (OSS). Most OSS licenses are covered by copyright law. The only exception is public domain software such as SQLite which corresponds to an explicit copyright disclamation in all possible forms.

 

The protective licenses claim to belong to a copyleft type which sounds like the opposite of the copyright. However, they still have intellectual property ownership, even though it can be distributed over multiple contributors over the given product evolution or its forking chain. A careful analysis of its OSS license is the only way to understand how intellectual property must be handled within each particular regulation.