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

[Johannes Berg]

On Mon, 2016-08-29 at 12:22 -0700, James Bottomley wrote:

> I suspect the eventual contract may look different. 

Yes, I'm sure it would. But getting $employer to accept it would be
similar, I'd assume.

> The problem in Europe is that the concept of ownership of the work is
> usually tied to the moral rights, so you can't give it up (even if
> you give up effective ownership when you sign away the economic
> rights).  In the US negotiation is definitely over ownership and what
> you usually end up with is so called undivided partial ownership,
> which gives either party full rights to enforce and sublicense.   I
> think, although never having had to negotiate this type of agreement
> in europe I'm not really experienced, that you'd need to negotiate to
> the point where each party has a non-exclusive licence with the right
> to sublicense to have some sort of equivalence.
> 
> Is there someone who's done this in Europe?
> 

I'm not aware.

I suspect the agreement text would end up being similar to the FSFE's
FLA (https://fsfe.org/activities/ftf/FLA.en.pdf), with key differences
being around the grant of rights (assuming $employer wants broader
rights than the FSFE here.)

In the US case, I'd assume that there would also be a broader license
granted to the employer than the open-source license governing the work
in question?

johannes