Here is some information about US copyright: http://www.loc.gov/copyright/circs/circ1.html It's pretty simple. Notice of copyright and registration are NOT required, but registration may be helpful if there are legal problems. It also mentions joint authorship and international works. Good reading ;-) Basically, we want to give notice of copyright for each release of Piper. And for every new contributor, unless the person waives their copyright, we need to list all authors and the earliest year of collaboration. So, for example, when we combined code bases, it was 2000, and the copyright would read (alphabetical order): Copyright (C) 2000 J.W. Bizzaro Brad Chapman Deanne Taylor Jean-Marc Valin Jarl van Katwijk But, if we got a new contributor in 2001, John Doe, the notice would read: Copyright (C) 2001 J.W. Bizzaro Brad Chapman Deanne Taylor John Doe Jean-Marc Valin Jarl van Katwijk The law says that the copyright is enforced for 70 years after the death of the last surviving author. So, shall we place bets? ;-) Cheers. Jeff