Hi all,
I'm looking for some simple legal advice before I have to speak to a laywer about this. I'm unfortunately not very familiar with the German Copyright Laws, so this will be a bit difficult for me.
I'm working on a small project (for now) for an internship that, under the terms of my contract, falls under the company's copyright. Convincing them to make an open source (GPL v2) release will be no problem, but I have a question about ensuring the future of my project. As the project will be open source, how can I make a copy under German law? If my firm decides to close up the source later, do I have the rights to make a fork of the last open version? More importantly, who has the copyrights to the forked version?
I am looking for some joint copyright anyways, and if I am lucky, this will be a non issue, but I'm looking for a backup plan just in case I can't make a deal with them.
Thanks in advance, Danke im Voraus, Yaakov Nemoy
* Yaakov Nemoy wrote, On 03/08/06 14:24:
Hi all,
I'm looking for some simple legal advice before I have to speak to a laywer about this. I'm unfortunately not very familiar with the German Copyright Laws, so this will be a bit difficult for me.
I'm working on a small project (for now) for an internship that, under the terms of my contract, falls under the company's copyright. Convincing them to make an open source (GPL v2) release will be no problem, but I have a question about ensuring the future of my project. As the project will be open source, how can I make a copy under German law? If my firm decides to close up the source later, do I have the rights to make a fork of the last open version? More importantly, who has the copyrights to the forked version?
I am looking for some joint copyright anyways, and if I am lucky, this will be a non issue, but I'm looking for a backup plan just in case I can't make a deal with them.
I'm not a lawer. I explain how the GPL works according to my understanding.
Once the source is licensed under the GPL you must, authorized and on behalf of the company, distribute the source to yourself personally or someone else under the terms of that License. Perhaps upload to sourceforge or make available on another website. Or email it to me. You might then easily receive a personal copy (under the terms of the GPL) from that source.
If the company then "withdraws the license", they actually decline to further distribute the software to anyone else under that license; however those who already have received it under the GPL license will be able to distribute their copy according as the GPL (which they received it under) permits.
Hence, to keep "it" "free" it must be licensed under the GPL to another person who will keep "it" available under the GPL.
Sam
Yaakov Nemoy wrote:
Hi all,
I'm looking for some simple legal advice before I have to speak to a laywer about this. I'm unfortunately not very familiar with the German Copyright Laws, so this will be a bit difficult for me.
Since I'm not a lawyer I can't provide you with legal advice. But I can provide you with some information based on my experiences and legal issues I had. As far as I understand German copyright law, labor law, and the GPL - if I'm wrong, please correct me:
German copyright law is still rather different from US or UK law. One of the biggest differences you will see is that German law knows 'authorship'. The authorship concept is also known in France, Italy, Benelux, etc. Other than in US copyright an author can't assign his/her authorship on a work to another party, but granting another party rights to market, sell, distribute, use, etc. his/her work. In general I would say that authorship concept is strengthening authors. If the work is created in an employment relationship the issue is getting more complicated. I would say that in any case it's recommended for both parties to have a clear agreement on the ownership and who has which rights on the work resulting from the employment.
FSF Europe has a Fiduciary Licence Agreement (FLA) and in the documents regarding the FLA and in the FLA you will find more details on that issue: http://www.fsfeurope.org/projects/fla/fla.en.html
I'm working on a small project (for now) for an internship that, under the terms of my contract, falls under the company's copyright. Convincing them to make an open source (GPL v2) release will be no problem, but I have a question about ensuring the future of my project. As the project will be open source, how can I make a copy under German law? If my firm decides to close up the source later, do I have the rights to make a fork of the last open version? More importantly, who has the copyrights to the forked version?
For the following considerations I assume that the purpose of your internship employment is the initial work on this project - and that neither you nor your employer based this work on a GPL'd work already existing.
If the company is releasing your work under GPL v2, your permission given, they can't undo this after they published the sources (let's say 'Foo 1.0') under GPL. This means: anyone who received a GPL'd copy of the Foo 1.0 sources distributed intentionally by your employer is a GPL licensee of this work and regarding this work has the rights and restrictions given by GPL, naturally regarding this specific release Foo 1.0. So, if the sources are distributed by your employer under GPL, get them and become a licensee!
You likely can't prohibit your employer from closing the source in the future - if you have not this option in your contract. But you will have the GPL'd Foo 1.0 sources (or you can get a copy of them from a licensee) and you may be able to continue working on them - and, if you also publish it, you then must release under GPL (say Fork 1.0). Your employer of course probably can close the source or publish it additionally under other licenses, e.g. dual-license concept. Also your employer can take Foo 1.0 (or a later version Foo 1.1 and distribute it exclusively as closed source and solely under proprietary license, because this would not violate GPL.
Exception: It would violate the GPL if your employer is not the only original author and got the work (Foo 0.5) or part of it already under GPL from you (or others) and you continued development of the work to Foo 1.0 during your labor relationship (which probably is fixed in your contract). A work which is derived from GPL'd work has to be published also under GPL if distributed.
Good luck
Anastasios