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Comment by fiatjaf | Hacker News Reader

So you can't do that? I do it all the time when I fork something.

Correct. You don’t own the code just because you forked it. The original copyright holders retain ownership, and you must abide by their license. You can’t swap out the license unless they explicitly allow you to do so.

That’s not true. You can change the license if the license allows you to. It’s copyright you can’t change unless the author assigns the copyright to you.

This comment highlights the ignorance of a lot of people in this thread jumping to conclusion and view MS instantly as an aggressor and themselves as victims of the obvious and horrible crime of copyright infringement.

A) Do you know it was not an honest mistake?

B) Why a complete understanding of esoteric legal copyright laws created by non-programmers all of a sudden so important to a mainly programmer HN audience?

Are you joking? Programming is all about intellectual property. A complete understanding of copyright laws is important for anyone in the tech industry.

Jurisprudence is a specialty beyond the skill level of an average lawyer. It's like saying to be able to eat you need to have a complete understanding of how to raise a chicken.

That’s exactly what I said. :)

One can add their copyrights, relicense in some cases, but absolutely cannot remove existing copyrights. I don't think any FOSS license (save for the "public domain" ones) allow for that.

You need to go revert all of those commits ASAP.

EDIT: also if there are any forks of your project, you should ask people who forked it to restore the original copyright notice as well. If the original copyright holder sees your name instead of theirs, they'll know who to sue.

That can get you into seriously hot water, I would suggest you stop doing that until you've had some interaction with an IP lawyer.

Hey if anyone considering down voting this guy - it is important question as a lot of people might not understand those things.

I see it as a honest question.

Instead of voting down, vote up so more people can read replies and see that it is not something that should be done.

Maybe read the license before agreeing to its terms.

You (or possibly your employer) own the copyright to the code you produce. And you are fine to say something like "copyright $me $yearIMadeACommit". What you can't do is claim copyright on work you did not produce or remove existing copyright notices.

Free or open source licenses aren’t a lack of copyright. They are an exercise of copyright. All of that code that you didn’t write is still copyrighted by their original authors. You simply have permission to use it under the criteria outlined in the license.

No, you cannot.

I'd advise you to fixup any forks on GitHub, e.g. https://github.com/fiatjaf/jiq/blob/master/LICENSE, which are currently in breach of license.

You'll need to inform anyone who forked your code, too.

This is something you agreed to in the following part of the license:

> The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.

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