[Ksummit-discuss] [CORE TOPIC] Owning your own copyrights in Linux

[James Bottomley <James.Bottomley@HansenPartnership.com>]

Regardless of the outcome of the GPL defence thread, I think we do
mostly agree that distributed copyright ownership is useful in Linux,
so I'd like to propose a practical topic on how individual developers
can achieve this.  I'm afraid this will mostly be US centric (since
that's where I've worked), but there's no reason we can't use similar
techniques in other jurisdictions.  I've used three techniques over my
career:

   1. Invention Disclosure Exceptions
   2. Separate agreements for Copyright ownership (useful because they can
      be negotiated even after you sign an employment agreement)
   3. Modifications to the employment agreement itself.

I can describe each of these and the negotiating process, which will
give real world examples for others to use.

In many ways, this would also be a good plumbers topic, but I can be
much more frank in the closed day of kernel summit which is why it
would be good to have the discussion there.

James