Check. Your. Contracts. It is risky to do open source work without having a written agreement with your employer that exempts it.
Bumble claims IP rights on employee's open-source libs
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Re: Bumble claims IP rights on employee's open-source libs
#12GitHub 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.…
Such an anonymous mode would be damaging for GitHub because it needs to stay friendly with its commercial and corporate customers. Besides, such a mode only provides obfuscation, but no legal protection at all. In fact, lawyers would turn it around and claim that using that mode showed that the owner of a repo was aware that what they were doing was wrong.
Your idea would have a better chance of success as a separate platform dedicated to anonymous code hosting. But that in turn would likely attract bad actors, as usual.
Re: Bumble claims IP rights on employee's open-source libs
#13Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 hou…
There might also be a clause in a salaried employee's contract that specifically requires them to notify the employer of any other work they are doing and get permission, precisely because otherwise the employer could end up in trouble under working time rules through no fault of their own.
As I understand it, this area can get very tricky because you have several general positions in law here that might be in conflict. For example, normally restraint of trade is not allowed, but there is also an implicit condition in any employment contract that the employee will properly serve their employer and that might include not doing other things that would interfere with their responsibilities as an employee. Then there is the whole question of whether work can be done off the clock for a salaried employee given there are limits on working hours and minimum wage requirements (though the latter probably won't be a relevant factor for anyone writing software). There have been related questions about people who are on call and they can get messy so it is not hard to imagine a case about IP rights getting messy with similar arguments being made by both sides.
Again, what OP needs here is a real employment lawyer. Without seeing the contract and other relevant information the most we can do is discuss the general issues, and even then and when this information all came from real lawyers, I am still cautious because my knowledge might be out of date or there might be other relevant factors we didn't discuss.
Re: Bumble claims IP rights on employee's open-source libs
#14Assuming 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…
If the copyright has always belonged to the employer then OP never had the legal ability to license it as open source in the first place. The employer could presumably shut the whole project down and in theory even go after others for copyright infringement retrospectively.
If there have been other contributors then the employer would not magically get the copyright to those contributions though, which could leave the whole project in limbo with no-one having enough rights to continue working on it and releasing the results.
Re: Bumble claims IP rights on employee's open-source libs
#15I 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 me…
The default position might be something like that but anyone writing software professionally surely has explicit provisions in their employment contract that would take precedence (as long as they hold up to any legal challenge of course).
Re: Bumble claims IP rights on employee's open-source libs
#16I 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…
>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.
There's no "but" here. It's abusive. It's reflective of the poor negotiating position employees often have with their employers. This is why the clause usually goes away once you're in demand.
Lawyers make a convenient scapegoat to hide behind for all sorts of bullshit (second only to "it's standard, it's standard!") but they are a service and they do as they are instructed. It's naive to think otherwise.
Re: Bumble claims IP rights on employee's open-source libs
#17Check. Your. Contracts. It is risky to do open source work without having a written agreement with your employer that exempts it.
Should your work in spare time be explicitly exempt in the contract, or, if side projects are not mentioned in the contract, does that implicitly exempt it?
Re: Bumble claims IP rights on employee's open-source libs
#18Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 me…
The default position might be something like that but anyone writing software professionally surely has explicit provisions in their employment contract that would take precedence (as long as they hold up to any legal challenge of course).
Contacts don't override every law. Ever heard of inalienable rights? Those are ones that you can't contact away.
Re: Bumble claims IP rights on employee's open-source libs
#19Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 me…
The default position might be something like that but anyone writing software professionally surely has explicit provisions in their employment contract that would take precedence (as long as they hold up to any legal challenge of course).
> as long as they hold up to any legal challenge of course
Which they don't because it makes no sense.
Transpose to a car mechanic fixing up junkers in their spare time, does the fixed junker belong to the company? Of course not.
Re: Bumble claims IP rights on employee's open-source libs
#20Bumble 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.
What does "a stream of wokeness" mean?