Just curious, why are the doc's copyrighted? Does this mean that all suggestions/inputs and updates must be approved by the person that holds the copyright? If so, where are the terms and the specifications of the copyright held? Are those terms available to the end user?

I believe all KDE documentation is copyrighted in order to keep it Free. It is available under a GPL type license I believe ( for documentation though )

mshelby wrote:Just curious, why are the doc's copyrighted?

All work above a certain threshold of triviality is automatically copyrighted by the repective authors.

Therefore all work to be consumed is also associated with a licence to grant the recipient rights on the work, e.g. distributing, editing, etc.

mshelby wrote:Does this mean that all suggestions/inputs and updates must be approved by the person that holds the copyright?

Depends on the work's licence.
For KDE documentation I would expect that any licence would explicitly allow modifications and redistribution.

Most likely GNU Free Documentation licence modified to not allow unchangable sections or a Creative Commons combination.

Cheers,
_

Ok, just to play devil's advocate. Let's say I completely re-wrote some documentation from scratch. Would that mean that I could copyright that documentation since is was not built from the original author's documentation? Assuming that I gave proper license and copyright credit to kde e.v , etc... ?

mshelby wrote:Ok, just to play devil's advocate. Let's say I completely re-wrote some documentation from scratch. Would that mean that I could copyright that documentation since is was not built from the original author's documentation? Assuming that I gave proper license and copyright credit to kde e.v , etc... ?

Well, that is not a KDE thing but a general law thing. It believe it is quite similar here (germany) to the usa.

When you are the writer, creator of something you are holding the Copyright (Urheberrecht) on it. Nothing else to do.

And in terms of KDE (at least for source). When you add/change something no trivial to a existing source file you add yourself to the copyright header with year, name, email address. If you created the file new yu are the only one it until someone else adds something significant.

I think it works similar for the kde documentation. So yes when you create a new Documentation for some KDE app you will be the copyright holder. But to ship it with KDE it has to be in one of the acceptes licences (I think some gnu licene for documentations in that case) which will allow everyone else to distribute it and make changes to it.