3 ms·

There's a loophole in most of these draconian contracts: they might own the copyright of what you do in your spare time, but they don't get to decide the licens

by knocte 10y ago

There's a loophole in most of these draconian contracts: they might own the copyright of what you do in your spare time, but they don't get to decide the license you use for your software (at least I've never seen any clause about this, ever). Then the solution is to use a liberal opensource license (MIT), and publish it somewhere. If you decide to reuse that code in the future for your own venture, you can just use it, the license allows you to do so even if the copyright is owned by your previous employer.

dangoor 10y ago
That's not right. The owner of the copyright is the only entity that can decide the license of the code.
- knocte 10y ago
  That's an assumption. Following that assumption, you would need to ask your employer if he agrees with any tiny contribution you do to any open source project out there. Which doesn't scale. What the employment contract does is own the contribution precisely because it doesn't make any sense to ask permission everytime an employee writes anything in his own time.
  - webmaven 10y ago
    > you would need to ask your employer if he agrees with any tiny contribution you do to any open source project out there. Which doesn't scale. This is why contributor agreements exist. They aren't per-contribution, but per-project (which scales much better).
  - dangoor 10y ago
    > That's an assumption. You're saying it's "an assumption" that only the copyright holder can dictate the license? That's not an assumption. That's the whole point of copyright. The owner of the copyright determines the terms under which others can use the copyright. Consider this: every open source project that has wanted to relicense but did not explicitly require a copyright assignment, had to talk to every single contributor to get their permission to relicense. > Following that assumption, you would need to ask your employer if he agrees with any tiny contribution you do to any open source project out there. Which doesn't scale. This gets into not what is legal but what is reasonable and sensible. If you write 20 lines of code using your work computer on work time and don't have prior authorization to give that code to an open source project, you technically have to get your employer's permission. Realistically, few employers would frown upon that. There are still companies out there that are not open source friendly. If you work for one of those, you'll find that you actually do need to get permission before contributing code. I should note that I am taking the US perspective on this. Different countries have different views of copyright, and as noted in the original post different US states have different views on employment contracts. IANAL, but I have managed and worked closely with some reasonably large open source projects and spent more than my fair share looking into licensing terms.
Asooka 10y ago
That's an interesting thought - does the copyright assignment happen before or after the license assignment? Let's say my contract says "employee agrees to transfer copyright to all work". Does that happen immediately the moment the work comes into existence? If yes - you can't actually license it how you want, since you're never the copyright owner of the work. What if I just don't assign the copyright? It is clear breach of contract, but at least for some amount of time, the company isn't the copyright owner, so you CAN assign a license. Can the court grant a retrospective copyright ownership, so that the original license is null? What if it was GPL3 and you gave the code to someone else, who made their own modifications and started distributing their version? If they're making money from it, could they sue the original company for loss of profit in the event that the court decrees that they don't actually have a license following the resolution of the lawsuit between the company and employee?

by knocte 10y ago

dangoor 10y ago

That's not right. The owner of the copyright is the only entity that can decide the license of the code.

knocte 10y ago
That's an assumption. Following that assumption, you would need to ask your employer if he agrees with any tiny contribution you do to any open source project out there. Which doesn't scale. What the employment contract does is own the contribution precisely because it doesn't make any sense to ask permission everytime an employee writes anything in his own time.
- webmaven 10y ago
  > you would need to ask your employer if he agrees with any tiny contribution you do to any open source project out there. Which doesn't scale. This is why contributor agreements exist. They aren't per-contribution, but per-project (which scales much better).
- dangoor 10y ago
  > That's an assumption. You're saying it's "an assumption" that only the copyright holder can dictate the license? That's not an assumption. That's the whole point of copyright. The owner of the copyright determines the terms under which others can use the copyright. Consider this: every open source project that has wanted to relicense but did not explicitly require a copyright assignment, had to talk to every single contributor to get their permission to relicense. > Following that assumption, you would need to ask your employer if he agrees with any tiny contribution you do to any open source project out there. Which doesn't scale. This gets into not what is legal but what is reasonable and sensible. If you write 20 lines of code using your work computer on work time and don't have prior authorization to give that code to an open source project, you technically have to get your employer's permission. Realistically, few employers would frown upon that. There are still companies out there that are not open source friendly. If you work for one of those, you'll find that you actually do need to get permission before contributing code. I should note that I am taking the US perspective on this. Different countries have different views of copyright, and as noted in the original post different US states have different views on employment contracts. IANAL, but I have managed and worked closely with some reasonably large open source projects and spent more than my fair share looking into licensing terms.

Asooka 10y ago

That's an interesting thought - does the copyright assignment happen before or after the license assignment? Let's say my contract says "employee agrees to transfer copyright to all work". Does that happen immediately the moment the work comes into existence? If yes - you can't actually license it how you want, since you're never the copyright owner of the work. What if I just don't assign the copyright? It is clear breach of contract, but at least for some amount of time, the company isn't the copyright owner, so you CAN assign a license. Can the court grant a retrospective copyright ownership, so that the original license is null? What if it was GPL3 and you gave the code to someone else, who made their own modifications and started distributing their version? If they're making money from it, could they sue the original company for loss of profit in the event that the court decrees that they don't actually have a license following the resolution of the lawsuit between the company and employee?