[Ksummit-discuss] [CORE TOPIC] Owning your own copyrights in Linux
Jiri Kosina
jikos at kernel.org
Mon Aug 29 18:32:21 UTC 2016
On Mon, 29 Aug 2016, Steven Rostedt wrote:
> 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.
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).
If there is any kind of session at KS about this matter, this aspect
should be taken into account.
Thanks,
--
Jiri Kosina
SUSE Labs
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