Making things even more grey is the fact that nearly every addon is a derivative of work built by numerous people who used various license agreements over the course of the addons' evolution.
Even though I have removed every addon that requested removal, at least 70% of them are technically not owned by the current author. It's a mess from the inside out. Unfortunately, those same authors are very upset and I hesitate to let them know that they don't in fact have the rights that they truly believe that they have. In the future if a company were truly trying to steal their work, they probably could without recourse. We have no intention of doing that.
It's not as cut and dried as "copyright" issue as most think, but at this point explaining the underlying issues to the authors in jeopardy would only exacerbate the situation. There is a lot of legal chatter going on in your IRC and on the forums that is simply misplaced. I truly hope that the false sense of security doesn't come to haunt them. They are a fantastic group of people.
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What the hell is this guy talking about? If there are multiple authors and no previous arrangement was made then multiple people hold copyright on the addon and any one of them can request its removal or sue them over it. If an addon uses a library then the library is under one license and the addon is under another license with a separate copyright.