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

[James Bottomley]

On Mon, 2016-08-29 at 09:07 -0400, Steven Rostedt wrote:
> [ Cc'd some that are not on this list ]
> 
> On Sun, 28 Aug 2016 10:00:54 -0700
> 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'd like to know more details of each of theses items.

Yes, judging by the offlist email I got about this, so would a lot of
people.  A lot of people also don't want to go on the record as even
being interested in this ...

The problem is that these are all end products of two party
negotiations which most of the other parties want kept confidential.  I
can't just bring them out in a public forum like Plumbers and, without
seeing the documents, that makes the discussion a lot less useful.

Let me see what I can get permission to do in an open forum.

> > 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.
> > 
[...]

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

Our current community is the community of technical contributors to
linux, but set of people with legal standing to be listened to in GPL
enforcement seems to be orders of magnitude smaller.  This is a pretty
bad state of affairs, which it seems worth discussing and giving people
the tools to remedy.

It's somewhat like voting reform: I want to give people the right to be
franchised in these discussions.  How they want to vote once they get
the franchise is a separate issue entirely.

James