The missing piece is some sort of framework for fractional, partial, composite, or shared ownership.  The performing arts folks have a notion of this, but it is pretty specialized.

Our notion of ownership is all or nothing, strictly binary.

Publishing has notions of dividing rights regionally and by medium ("movie rights" is a recognized term) but not really a composite view.

Movies have some stuff, but every movie is represented by its own ton-of-paper contract.  No real general ideas.

http://nygeek.net/2010/01/02/whose-data-are-these-anyway-2/

On Wed, Sep 21, 2022, 08:37 Rob Pike <robpike@gmail.com> wrote:
It was a long time ago but it rankled at the time (and even came up in my Bell Labs interview): that copyright notice replaced whatever was there before. Code written and copyrighted by other institutions was absorbed into the Berkeley distribution and reattributed without credit. Joy told me later that the lawyers made them do it. He was probably telling the truth, but that didn't make it OK.

-rob


On Wed, Sep 21, 2022 at 8:12 PM Warner Losh <imp@bsdimp.com> wrote:
I hate myself a little bit, but I posted an answer to the 'BSD license origin' in this twitter thread
that people might find interesting.

Please note the caveats at the end of the thread: This is a bare outline hitting the high points taking only data from release files with no behind the scenes confirmation about why things changed, nor in-depth exploration of variations that I know are present, nor do I got into examples from various USENET postings from the time that stole the license for people's own different uses.

Nonetheless, I hope it's useful...

Warner