Bumble claims IP rights on employee's open-source libs
1–10 of 339 posts
Re: Bumble claims IP rights on employee's open-source libs
#2I am almost certain that IP law overrides and voids any abusive contract in the UK.
Bumble would have to prove in court that the employee did the open source work on either company time or using company resources for this to hold.
Re: Bumble claims IP rights on employee's open-source libs
#3Bumble has a wave of abuse incoming. Everyone checking their Twitter account will see a stream of wokeness and be triggered by the discrepancy to their petty evil behaviour.
This kind of ignorance is and should be pretty damaging to their brand, although I already sympathize with their poor social media workers who will have to deal with the onslaught.
Re: Bumble claims IP rights on employee's open-source libs
#4Here in Russia Rambler tried to do the same with nginx, and they failed to achieve their goals. I don't know, it creates nothing but bad publicity without giving anything in return considering they won't maintain it anyway if the core devs leave (and nothing stops them from forking and creating their commercial solution right now). The image of Rambler before: "Igor Sysoev created nginx while working at Rambler" (positive association). The image now: "Igor Sysoev created nginx in his spare time and he just happened to work for Rambler at the time and Rambler tried to take away his project by SWATing their office". It's like some pointless greed ("it's mine!!") above all pragmatism.
Re: Bumble claims IP rights on employee's open-source libs
#5I am almost certain that IP law overrides and voids any abusive contract in the UK. Bumble would have to prove in court that the employee did the open source work on either company time or using company resources for this to hold.
Why do you believe that? There is specific wording that is customary to use in an employment contract in at least England and Wales (along the lines of "work done in the course of your employment") if that sort of agreement is intended. It would typically cover work done on employer time, using the employer's resources, or in a field related to working for the employer, and you have to be careful about how broadly the latter can be interpreted in the context of the rest of the contract.
It is also sadly not unusual for employers to seek IP rights to all creative work done by a salaried employee during their term of employment as an explicit provision of the employment contract. Most of us here might consider that abusive but it might remove ambiguity and put the employer on safer ground legally in the event of a later dispute, and lawyers gonna lawyer.
I have argued before that an employee should reject that kind of excessively broad term and if working in a creative industry like software development they should seriously consider whether they really want to work for that employer if the employer is unwilling to change to the more customary contractual agreement when it is challenged. But a lot of people just sign contracts without reading them and unfortunately OP may be in trouble here if that is what they did.
If the employment contract contains no IP clauses that make the agreement explicit then maybe the course of employment rule would be the default but this would be very unlikely for anyone working in a creative industry and OP's description suggests there is specific wording being cited in this case.
I am not a lawyer. The understanding above does come from discussing this issue with real lawyers in England more than once, but not since a few years ago. As always, get your legal advice from a real lawyer if it matters and not from some random HN comment.
Re: Bumble claims IP rights on employee's open-source libs
#6I note that Software Freedom Conservancy advocates renegotiating your contract to retain ownership of code you write for open source projects you work on:
Re: Bumble claims IP rights on employee's open-source libs
#7I am almost certain that IP law overrides and voids any abusive contract in the UK. Bumble would have to prove in court that the employee did the open source work on either company time or using company resources for this to hold.
UK law is pretty clear: if you are a contractor then you own everything you create, but if you are a salaried employee (”work for hire”) then your employer owns everything you create that’s related to the business.
If you write Perl for a bank they don’t own the songs you compose in the shower (they afe outside the ”scope of employment”.)
They probably own your money manager side project though. “Probably” here means, as always, “has a good chance of winning at tribunal” rather than any defensible logical meaning.
Re: Bumble claims IP rights on employee's open-source libs
#8GitHub should try to enable some sort of toggled anonymous mode for select repos, while users should make their FOSS/social identities less obvious or decoupled if their employers aren't that friendly with such clauses.
With remote work becoming more pervasive, employees should really not be doing any personal things on work computers because their traffic is definitely going to be analysed by someone or some system.
Just a general reminder as well - Companies/Govt's would absolutely love for GitHub/Gitlab or any social platform to require ID card verification for users if that was on the table.
Re: Bumble claims IP rights on employee's open-source libs
#9I am almost certain that IP law overrides and voids any abusive contract in the UK. Bumble would have to prove in court that the employee did the open source work on either company time or using company resources for this to hold.
Why do you believe that? There is specific wording that is customary to use in an employment contract in at least England and Wales (along the lines of "work done in the course of your employment") if that sort of agreement is intended. It would typically cover work done on employer time, using the employer's resources, or in a field related to working for the employer, and you have to be careful about how broadly th…
This sounds lile really greay areas though. Can an employer claim the work of something done outside of work (as in paid) hours?
If the employer didn't retribute this time in the first place, can it be considered as being in the "course of the employment"?
This seems that if this kind of super generic statement will always go in the way of the employer, it would be a giant loophole to go any regulation on working hours.
In this specific case though we don't really know the details and maybe some of the work was done during working hours.
Re: Bumble claims IP rights on employee's open-source libs
#10Assuming for the moment that their claim is legally sound, what are the practical implications? The code is already published under an open-source license, with multiple other contributors to which they don't have an employment relationship...
Ownership would allow them to relicense the employees original contributions, but they'd still need to negotiate with or replace all code by other contributors, and they can't un-opensource the existing codebase, right?