Copyright assignment

[mjg59]

The fundamental problem with projects requiring copyright assignment is that there's an economic cost involved in me letting a competitor sell a closed version of my code without letting me sell a closed version of their code. If this cost is perceived as larger than the cost of maintaining my code outside the upstream tree, it's cheaper for me to fork than it is to sign over my rights. So if I have my own engineering resources, what rational benefit is there to me assigning my copyright?

Comments

Copyright Assignment in Germany?

[(Anonymous)]

I always wonder how Copyright Assignment legally works in countries like Germany, that don't have the concept of copyright like the US does. In Germany, according to the "Urheberrecht", the ownership of the work is bound to the author and cannot be re-assigned. After all, he is the author...

So no matter what piece of paper he signs, legally nothing can take away the author's ownership of the IP, so while he can assign usage right to third parties, he will always retain his own rights to the things he wrote, including the right to relicense.

Or so is my understanding, at least.

Re: Copyright Assignment in Germany?

[(Anonymous)]

Not quite. You can't ever give up authorship, because, well, you are the author, that isn't something transferrable. You can give someone an exclusive usage/distribution license, which would be the equivalent of signing over copyright. Being exclusive means of course that you can't license it to someone else.

What you can't give up/sign over is the rights directly tied to authorship, such as the right to be named as the creator, or the right to not be named as the creator, and a few more. There are some more restrictions on authorship rights for software written as an employee as part of your job, IIRC.

Besides, Germany is not a rare case here. In Europe authors' rights would be basically everywhere but the UK, I think. Copyright is a system born from the UK legal philosophy and is thus found mostly in those countries whose legal tradition is influenced by it, such as the USA.