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

[Steven Rostedt <rostedt@goodmis.org>]

On Mon, 29 Aug 2016 08:54:22 -0700
James Bottomley <James.Bottomley@HansenPartnership.com> wrote:


> The rest of this is a bit offtopic (it would be on topic in the GPL

Sorry for hijacking your thread ;-)

> 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.

Personally, I have a small amount of copyrights in the kernel that were
done while I was self employed. But a lot more belong to my current
employer. I have mixed feelings about trying to own those. One, I trust
my current employer with those copyrights, and two, they paid me to do
that code. It was never done "on my own time". I don't feel right
trying to claim copyright for code I was paid for, even if it was all
my idea to create.

But that may not be the case in the future, and I would like to know my
options.

-- Steve