I'm presuming what you are referring to, and which is likely to confuse a predominantly English speaking audience is that a number of countries with legal systems typically based in Germanic or Napoleonic legal systems, copyright consists of the combination of moral rights on one side and economic rights on the other hand.
Moral rights are generally impossible to forfeit and assign. Economic rights usually (I don't know of any jurisdictions where assigning economic rights to the project maintainer would be impossible - are you?) are possible to assign.
In common law systems, the two are usually traditionally much more closely tied, and when we talk about copyright in English, it is usually the economic rights we're referring to.
