How owns the copyright to the intellectual property in open source software. using android as an example.

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Whoever owns the software does. Open Source doesn't mean that one company doesn't own it. It just means the source is available for everyone to SEE so they can write other code to work with it.

yeah, that wasn't the original purpose of the open source movement. its purposes were very much alike free software where you can change it and redistribute it as well as just see it. it depends on the license that comes with a particular program. android is a name of a collection of programs, if you're talking about the name itself or the distribution of programs, then in both cases it's likely that google own the copyright. if you consider the kernel that's used then, again, it's probably google who own the copyright if i'm not mislead in saying that their kernel is a forked version of linux and not the linux kernel itself. but remember that the kernel is only one program amongst many in android, some other program's copyrights are probably not owned by google. you can read this for more information: http://www.linux.org/docs/ldp/howto/Module-HOWTO/copyright.html