[gentoo-nfp] Re: [gentoo-dev] Re: [gentoo-dev-announce] Soliciting Feedback: Gentoo Copyright Assignments / Licensing

[Rich Freeman]

On Thu, Dec 20, 2012 at 11:08 PM, Greg KH <gregkh@g.o> wrote:
> On Fri, Dec 21, 2012 at 02:32:25AM +0000, Robin H. Johnson wrote:
>> 1. Are you party to any *copyright assignment* (eg FSF copyright assignment)?
>
> You need to rephrase this to be (in order for it to make any sense):
>   Are you party to any *copyright assignment* that is not part of your
>   employment agreement?
>
> Otherwise, everyone in the US, and most other countries, would almost
> always have to just say "yes" to this, as their employer owns the
> copyright for their work no matter what it is done on (open source or
> not.)

Work done for hire is certainly owned by the employer, unless an
agreement to the contrary is explicitly documented, but employment
agreements that purport to assign copyright for works unrelated to
employment to the employer are rare.  Maybe they're not as rare in the
software industry, but most people aren't employed in the software
industry (even if most Gentoo developers might be - though perhaps not
as a big a majority as you might expect).

Certainly I haven't signed any kind of document that assigns ownership
of works created on my own time to my employer, and the legality of
any contract I did sign to that effect would be dubious.

>
> Remember, in the US, individuals who actually own the copyright on the
> work they do is quite rare once they get out of college, and even then,
> while in college, the school does have the right to assert copyright
> ownership of the work, depending on what it was done on/for (who
> provided the equipment, tasks, etc.)

Ownership of "work" in the sense of something you're paid to do
usually does tend to reside with whoever is paying you to do the work,
unless you're a consultant of some kind or otherwise paid by the
engagement (in which case it is usually spelled out).  Ownership of
stuff like the photos everybody will be taking next week with family
rarely ends up belonging to an employer.

Don't get me wrong, if somebody is being paid by the Linux Foundation
to update packages in various distros I could certainly see how that
could be considered a work for hire.  However, such arrangements are
rare even in the open source world.

However, as you've pointed out those situations do exist and the
contributions covered by them are often important.  If we were to
pursue assignment of some kind, then I'm thinking that a voluntary
arrangement like the one used by KDE would make more sense.  However,
about the only thing that would really help with is keeping the
copyright notice simple (if Gentoo owns 50+% of a file we could
probably just put "Copyright 2012 Gentoo Foundation" on it, but don't
quote me on that as I'd like to get some confirmation on that and find
out what others are doing).  It probably wouldn't be worth the trouble
unless it could be semi-automated (Google collects CLA signatures
electronically - and electronic signatures are a whole separate mess
of law - the legal standards are pretty low but I really wonder how
well they'd stand up if somebody wanted to repudiate one).

Rich