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

[Johannes Berg <johannes@sipsolutions.net>]

On Mon, 2016-08-29 at 20:32 +0200, Jiri Kosina wrote:

> Just for the sake of completness, the situation is quite
> dramatically different in US (where the jurisdiction system is based
> on common law, which means that employer indeed owns the copyright in
> work created by employees), whereas in civil law systems, it's
> usually legally impossible to assign the moral rights away from the
> actual person creating the work (the employer just usually owns a
> licence to the economic rights).

*exclusive* license. That's an important distinction.

> If there is any kind of session at KS about this matter, this aspect 
> should be taken into account.
> 

I'm not really sure it matters *that* much. Where you'd negotiate "own
copyright and give $company the regular license (perhaps plus some
extra license to use it as non-GPL, or some covenant not to sue, or
such)" in the US, you'd have to negotiate "own economic rights [...]"
in other jurisdictions.

Much of the negotiation leading up to that will be very similar,
presumably.

johannes