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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

#91

Post by rwmj »

_odey wrote: post #81
rwmj wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Red Hat has an explicit clause in the contract allowing work on open source projects. As always best to consult a lawyer (not one connected to the company) if this is likely to be important to you.

Would you, or somebody working, or who had worked for Red Hat be willing to copy paste that clause, or contract, redacted of course so we could use it as an example. Red Hat being who they are, their approach is extremely relevant to this situation.

I did try to dig out the contract just now to see if I had a digital copy of it, but I don't think I do. It's likely to be a two decade old printed copy instead. I think you need to talk to a lawyer rather than trying to do this on the cheap. Your lawyer has your interests at heart, no one else does. If you're a member of a union (Prospect being a good one for digital workers) then they will have lawyers you can consult for free.

Re: Bumble claims IP rights on employee's open-source libs

#92

Post by ealexhudson »

jiveturkey wrote: post #63
ealexhudson wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Copyright is automatically the employer's in the UK: the term is "in the course of employment", and no contractual language is required. The employer is effectively the author. What that term means is a matter of case law, and is different if you are contracted / self-employed. Typically it is interpreted in a pro-employer manner, and if you are employed to write code then then assume that all the code you write is y…

"in the course of" meaning, related to. personal work on personal time is not 'In the course of" employment. It's that latter bit that the GP is obviously asking about. The contract he linked has especially egegrious language. It's not worth negotiating IMO. Any employer that even tries to get such language in is showing their cards.

The plain reading meaning of "in the course of" is not the case law, though, it has established precedent - and most of that favoured the employers in question. I don't know of a case that took into account "personal time" as being relevant, and most salaried employees are not paid on the basis of hours worked.

The typical contractual language does go beyond the established case law, but not by as far as you seem to suggest.

Re: Bumble claims IP rights on employee's open-source libs

#93

Post by _odey »

rwmj wrote: post #91
_odey wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Would you, or somebody working, or who had worked for Red Hat be willing to copy paste that clause, or contract, redacted of course so we could use it as an example. Red Hat being who they are, their approach is extremely relevant to this situation.

I did try to dig out the contract just now to see if I had a digital copy of it, but I don't think I do. It's likely to be a two decade old printed copy instead. I think you need to talk to a lawyer rather than trying to do this on the cheap. Your lawyer has your interests at heart, no one else does. If you're a member of a union (Prospect being a good one for digital workers) then they will have lawyers you can cons…

I will talk to a lawyer as well... but I'm really interested to see something concrete too. I've asked many times but I've never actually received an example of what an actual contract had written on it.

Re: Bumble claims IP rights on employee's open-source libs

#94

Post by masklinn »

Xylakant wrote: post #51
masklinn wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

This is not a good analogy. A substantial chunk of the value of software is often the idea, not only the time worked on something. Ideas and inventions don’t happen on a schedule. Think of a chemist that is tasked with finding a way to synthesize a compound. He tries all day at work, and in the evening, on the couch, he’s struck by a bolt of enlightenment. Who does that idea belong to? German law would be pretty clea…

> And often, software is similar.

That only holds if the side-project is exactly what the company does, and even then it’s debatable: if a person is interested in problem X and has personal projects around X, and the company hires them because if that, do they really expect that person to stop being interested in X on a personal level?

Re: Bumble claims IP rights on employee's open-source libs

#95

Post by ealexhudson »

akvadrako wrote: post #65
_odey wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So does that mean there is literally nothing I can do about it? Except becoming a contractor?

That isn't what he said – just it's the employer's by default. So get a contract that makes your outside work explicitly yours.

Exactly. Any form of "agree and accept that /X/ does not relate to the employment" sort of thing.

But you have to be very specific about what is carved out.

Re: Bumble claims IP rights on employee's open-source libs

#96

Post by dmurray »

ainar-g wrote: post #29
greatgib wrote: post #25

Here the question is even a little bit more interesting than just the "open source" code you created I think: There is lot of discussion about the ownership of the code, but what about the other things related to the project? Like stars and issues. In no way stars and issues belongs to the company, they belongs to each user that submitted them. They submitted them to the project that was on a specific username. So, I…

An interesting related question I've always had is what even counts as a contribution. For example, consider the three situations: (a) I open an issue about a feature not working. E.g.: “When I press the button, the app crashes”. (b) Same as (a), but I also point out the place in the code where the error is without providing any code to fix it. E.g. “When I press the button, the app crashes, and I think that it has t…

I think there's a clear distinction in most jurisdictions between (c) and the other two.

Let's suppose this bug report really was written on company time, with company equipment, related to the company's business, so we don't have to argue about how far-reaching your employer's rights should be here.

In (a) and (b), you've provided services to the code maintainers. Perhaps your employment contract forbids you from doing that, just as it might prohibit you doing project management or fixing their plumbing. But the recipient of those services hasn't done anything wrong.

In (c) you've additionally created intellectual property, to which you have some rights, including copyright. The code maintainers can't use that code in their product unless you assign them certain of those rights (or unless they can avail of other exemptions like fair use). But those rights might not be yours to assign - they might be your employer's. In addition to you potentially breaking your agreement with your employer, anyone republishing this code may be infringing your employer's IP rights (maybe under good faith, maybe you indemnified them... But still your employer has a legitimate complaint).

Re: Bumble claims IP rights on employee's open-source libs

#97

Post by em-bee »

tomxor wrote: post #90
cassianoleal wrote: post #82

Many years ago I had a job offer at Badoo in the UK. After many rounds of going back-and-forth with the contract, me trying to better understand certain clauses, them going back to the lawyers, etc. I told them I'd be happy to sign if they removed the caluses that stated pretty much anything I created on or off hours belonged to them. They went back to the lawyers and came back to me saying that this is not the first…

I had a similar situation with my current job, but with a happy ending. The contract was "standard" but others who also read it thoroughly had the same issue with broad, overreaching clauses that essentially attempt to claim complete IP ownership of everything the employee ever touched. The directors were very reasonable and understood my concerns, we eventually managed to remove or reword all of the offending parts.…

in my first fulltime job in the US, i managed to not only have the offending clauses removed but also a clause added that guaranteed that all code i'd write for the company would be released under the GPL (as i was going to work on something FOSS related anyways)

with that clause ownership mattered less because i knew that i would be able to reuse any of my code under the GPL which was good enough for me.

Re: Bumble claims IP rights on employee's open-source libs

#98

Post by caseymarquis »

hdjjhhvvhga wrote: post #88
cassianoleal wrote: post #82

Many years ago I had a job offer at Badoo in the UK. After many rounds of going back-and-forth with the contract, me trying to better understand certain clauses, them going back to the lawyers, etc. I told them I'd be happy to sign if they removed the caluses that stated pretty much anything I created on or off hours belonged to them. They went back to the lawyers and came back to me saying that this is not the first…

My experience from the other side of the fence is that this is pretty standard, i.e. nobody would really bother with changing the standard contract for one potential employee unless they were perceived as a crucial asset. The people who do the hiring, the ones who make the decisions and the ones who will work with you later - these are very different groups of people, with some (very temporary) overlap. The hiring on…

I would. I'd actually view someone asking for this as a positive.

Re: Bumble claims IP rights on employee's open-source libs

#99

Post by em-bee »

ainar-g wrote: post #29
greatgib wrote: post #25

Here the question is even a little bit more interesting than just the "open source" code you created I think: There is lot of discussion about the ownership of the code, but what about the other things related to the project? Like stars and issues. In no way stars and issues belongs to the company, they belongs to each user that submitted them. They submitted them to the project that was on a specific username. So, I…

An interesting related question I've always had is what even counts as a contribution. For example, consider the three situations: (a) I open an issue about a feature not working. E.g.: “When I press the button, the app crashes”. (b) Same as (a), but I also point out the place in the code where the error is without providing any code to fix it. E.g. “When I press the button, the app crashes, and I think that it has t…

what is to be owned in case of (a) and (b)?

at the most extreme (a) means that you are opening an issue in the name of the company. the question then is: were you allowed to do that? (many contracts forbid you to speak in the name if the company unless explicitly instructed)

and (b) would mean that you contributed a company resource to the project (namely you contributed yourself, your knowledge, etc), but it is the company who gets to say where you are allowed/supposed to contribute to

those would be the extreme interpretations, and in both cases, once it's done, it can't be taken back.

only code that you write can be taken back, so if you report a bug to me, i may not be able to use your solution to fix it, but your company can't stop me from knowing about the bug and then fixing it myself.

so (a) and (b) may be a contract violation and they may fire you for it, but that's all they can do. only (c) contains actual code that they can revoke if you didn't have the right to contribute it.

Re: Bumble claims IP rights on employee's open-source libs

#100

Post by Thiez »

andi999 wrote: post #46
kgeist wrote: post #4

Here 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" (pos…

If the company owns it, the the (gpl or whatever) licensing was not legal, so the core devs cannot 'fork it', since that would be illegal. They can rewrite the project from scratch though.

The company would have to remove all contributions of external developers though. If the project was not licensed under the GPL, but external contributors did contribute to the project under the GPL, then it seems to me that either the company has to release the project under the GPL, or remove all the third-party contributions and any code that might be derived from those contributions (since it would be a derived work). Realistically they would have to revert the project to where it was before the first external contributor contributed and rewrite all subsequent development from scratch.
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