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

[Daniel Vetter]

On Sun, Aug 28, 2016 at 7:00 PM, James Bottomley
<James.Bottomley at hansenpartnership.com> 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 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.

I'm very much interested in this. I think on top of what you're
proposing we should look into making an official recommendation about
the ks attendee's stance on this, maybe something the TAB could do if
we reach some useful consensus. I've also heard that there's people
working on example contracts/clauses already too, again something the
TAB could engage in after ks. At least I believe this will be a lot
easier to negotiate if we make it a collective effort.
-Daniel
-- 
Daniel Vetter
Software Engineer, Intel Corporation
+41 (0) 79 365 57 48 - http://blog.ffwll.ch