From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Return-Path: Received: from smtp1.linuxfoundation.org (smtp1.linux-foundation.org [172.17.192.35]) by mail.linuxfoundation.org (Postfix) with ESMTPS id 6EC5A305 for ; Mon, 29 Aug 2016 15:54:27 +0000 (UTC) Received: from bedivere.hansenpartnership.com (bedivere.hansenpartnership.com [66.63.167.143]) by smtp1.linuxfoundation.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id CBFB4A8 for ; Mon, 29 Aug 2016 15:54:26 +0000 (UTC) Message-ID: <1472486062.2376.26.camel@HansenPartnership.com> From: James Bottomley To: Steven Rostedt Date: Mon, 29 Aug 2016 08:54:22 -0700 In-Reply-To: <20160829090703.1c063975@gandalf.local.home> References: <1472403654.2420.29.camel@HansenPartnership.com> <20160829090703.1c063975@gandalf.local.home> Content-Type: text/plain; charset="UTF-8" Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Cc: Linus Torvalds , ksummit-discuss@lists.linuxfoundation.org Subject: Re: [Ksummit-discuss] [CORE TOPIC] Owning your own copyrights in Linux List-Id: List-Unsubscribe: , List-Archive: List-Post: List-Help: List-Subscribe: , On Mon, 2016-08-29 at 09:07 -0400, Steven Rostedt wrote: > [ Cc'd some that are not on this list ] > > On Sun, 28 Aug 2016 10:00:54 -0700 > James Bottomley wrote: > > > 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'd like to know more details of each of theses items. Yes, judging by the offlist email I got about this, so would a lot of people. A lot of people also don't want to go on the record as even being interested in this ... The problem is that these are all end products of two party negotiations which most of the other parties want kept confidential. I can't just bring them out in a public forum like Plumbers and, without seeing the documents, that makes the discussion a lot less useful. Let me see what I can get permission to do in an open forum. > > 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. > > [...] The rest of this is a bit offtopic (it would be on topic in the GPL defence thread). However, all I will say is that at the moment, if you don't own copyrights on your own contributions to Linux (and if you took no actions to make this happen, you likely don't), you have no legal standing in any GPL enforcement and a court would likely not even bother listening to your opinion. Our current community is the community of technical contributors to linux, but set of people with legal standing to be listened to in GPL enforcement seems to be orders of magnitude smaller. This is a pretty bad state of affairs, which it seems worth discussing and giving people the tools to remedy. It's somewhat like voting reform: I want to give people the right to be franchised in these discussions. How they want to vote once they get the franchise is a separate issue entirely. James