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 D9DB125A for ; Mon, 29 Aug 2016 19:22:52 +0000 (UTC) Received: from bedivere.hansenpartnership.com (bedivere.hansenpartnership.com [66.63.167.143]) by smtp1.linuxfoundation.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 56B4625B for ; Mon, 29 Aug 2016 19:22:52 +0000 (UTC) Message-ID: <1472498570.2376.44.camel@HansenPartnership.com> From: James Bottomley To: Johannes Berg , Jiri Kosina , Steven Rostedt Date: Mon, 29 Aug 2016 12:22:50 -0700 In-Reply-To: <1472496471.14003.14.camel@sipsolutions.net> References: <1472403654.2420.29.camel@HansenPartnership.com> <20160829090703.1c063975@gandalf.local.home> <1472486062.2376.26.camel@HansenPartnership.com> <20160829121615.25e5ddce@gandalf.local.home> <1472496471.14003.14.camel@sipsolutions.net> 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 20:47 +0200, Johannes Berg wrote: > 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. Indeed: even under jurisdictions which make a distinction between economic and moral rights (only the former being assignable), an exclusive licence becomes the equivalent of ownership. You certainly can't use residual moral rights to enforce a licence like the GPL because that's mostly about economic rights. > > 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. Exactly: to be a party to GPL enforcement, you still need to retain some of the economic rights ownership you likely gave away in your employment contract. I suspect the eventual contract may look different. The problem in Europe is that the concept of ownership of the work is usually tied to the moral rights, so you can't give it up (even if you give up effective ownership when you sign away the economic rights). In the US negotiation is definitely over ownership and what you usually end up with is so called undivided partial ownership, which gives either party full rights to enforce and sublicense. I think, although never having had to negotiate this type of agreement in europe I'm not really experienced, that you'd need to negotiate to the point where each party has a non-exclusive licence with the right to sublicense to have some sort of equivalence. Is there someone who's done this in Europe? James