Employment agreements for free-software developers
Employment agreements for free-software developers
Posted May 27, 2016 15:46 UTC (Fri) by hkario (subscriber, #94864)Parent article: Employment agreements for free-software developers
in most of Europe copyright stays with the author forever. Author may sell rights to distribution of the work, but authorship is unalienable.
Exclusivity agreements are also handled specifically by law. For example, in Poland the employer must pay at minimum 25% of the nominal contract value after the employee stopped working but the exclusivity clause is in force. For the entire time the exclusivity clause is in force. Not to mention that there are cases in which those clauses are completely illegal...
Posted May 31, 2016 9:11 UTC (Tue)
by jezuch (subscriber, #52988)
[Link]
At a copyright course at my university we were given a Microsoft EULA and were supposed to tell what percentage of it was illegal/void/moot in the context of our national copyright law. The answer: very much most of it. Copyright holders simply work from the assumption that the "general public" doesn't know anything about copyright law and will agree to anything that seems "right" (in the current climate) - or can be intimidated to do so. And lawyers who actually read and understand this stuff won't do anything about it because it's not actually illegal to put a clause that prohibits something that's explicitly allowed by the law - this clause is simply void and you are free to ignore it, but you can't sue.
Posted May 31, 2016 10:23 UTC (Tue)
by BenHutchings (subscriber, #37955)
[Link] (1 responses)
I think you're confusing copyright (generally transferrable) with moral rights (inalienable). The two are sometimes conflated in European legal terms, e.g. the German "Urheberrecht". The difference in the US is that moral rights don't exist. (While in the UK, they exist for most media but not for software!)
Posted Jul 3, 2016 16:21 UTC (Sun)
by JanC_ (guest, #34940)
[Link]
If it's not in US "copyright law", it will likely be part of other laws.
Employment agreements for free-software developers
Employment agreements for free-software developers
in most of Europe copyright stays with the author forever.
Employment agreements for free-software developers