employer/employee copyright

Posted Aug 28, 2016 2:42 UTC (Sun) by giraffedata (guest, #1954)
In reply to: 25 Years of Linux — so far by pabs
Parent article: 25 Years of Linux — so far

... reasons that Linux developers should demand to keep their copyrights in Linux instead of giving them to their employers.

Maybe you're trying to make a political point with this wording, but it's misleading. In the US, when someone pays someone else to write code, the copyright naturally belongs to the employer and the employer would have to give it to the developer for the developer to have it. Copyrights are man-made rights and the people who created them defined who's rights they would be.

employer/employee copyright

Posted Aug 29, 2016 10:08 UTC (Mon) by pabs (subscriber, #43278) [Link] (1 responses)

I don't think there is anything "natural" about copyright, nor about employers owning it. As well as copyright transfers, the "employer owns copyright" rule can be overridden by the employment contract in at least the US and the UK:

http://www.copyright.gov/title17/92chap2.html#201
https://www.gov.uk/guidance/ownership-of-copyright-works#...

employer/employee copyright

Posted Aug 30, 2016 2:27 UTC (Tue) by giraffedata (guest, #1954) [Link]

I believe those are exactly the points I made. We made up copyright law and arbitrarily decided that by default it belongs to the employer (I see "naturally" could be taken another way; I just meant that with the law in place and no further action, the employer has the copyright), so for the employee to have it, the employer has to do something to give it up.

That's the opposite of the impression a reader would get from the phrasing, "employees should demand to keep their copyrights in Linux." The word "keep" implies that the copyright starts off belonging to the employee and the employee should insist on keeping it that way. If we want to give the correct impression (unless, again, we're trying to make a political point about truly natural rights being different from the ones created by law), a better wording would be, "employees should demand to own the copyright in their work on Linux."