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

[Jiri Kosina <jikos@kernel.org>]

On Mon, 29 Aug 2016, James Bottomley 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.

Yes, but economic rights can be assigned even in the other direction of 
course. I've seen contracts which made it possible for an employee to 
request an assignment of economic rights back in individual cases / for 
individual creations.

Of course, it's ultimately still employer's decision whether the 
back-assignment happens or not, but worth mentioning as an option as well.

-- 
Jiri Kosina
SUSE Labs