Questions re copyright of contributions

[ghost]

The documentation in this repo continues to be made available via a Creative Commons license, specifically CC BY-SA 4.0 - this is the same licence used before the switch to the new toolchain. However, after the documentation built with the new toolchain was released, the following additional text appeared on raspberrypi.org/documentation:

The Raspberry Pi Documentation is Copyright (c) 2012-2021 Raspberry Pi Trading (Ltd) and is [...]

This is surprising to me, since there was previously no indication that a contribution which I made to the documentation repository would be treated as being copyright of anyone other than myself. In fact, unless I assign copyright to a third party, I would expect my contributions to remain copyright of me. There is also no indication in this repo, other than in the copyright message added as an include within each page, that contributions to this repo will be treated as being copyright of Raspberry Pi (Trading) Ltd. (As an aside, you have put the parentheses in the wrong place - see above quote).

Can you possibly clarify what the copyright policy is for contributions to this repository which come from persons and companies outside the Raspberry Pi group of companies?

[ghost]

In the absence of any statement to the contrary, I can only assume that Trading is claiming copyright on all external contributions. In which case: cheerio.

[LizUpton]

Not sure anybody is following this any more (it's been a few weeks, for which apologies - this got kicked up to me and was pretty low on my priority list at a very busy time).

This slightly conspiratorial conception of how copyright works under CC BY-SA had me scratching my head a bit - the licence we use here is exactly the same licence Wikipedia uses, and I've never come across anybody accusing them of anything similar.

I had a brief phone call with our copyright lawyers to check I hadn't missed anything. I hadn't. FWIW, people making a contribution here still hold the copyright to their contribution, but because they've actively published that contribution based on our repo, which has SA in it, GPL-like magic happens.

In short, nobody is ripping anybody off, and there is nothing to see here.