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Copyright assignment with the FSF

Since 1985, the Free Software Foundation (FSF) has promoted computer user freedom through a myriad of campaigns, including the steadfast and demonstrated promise to support the GNU Project. To this end, the FSF holds copyright on the family of GNU General Public Licenses (GPL) and a large portion of the GNU operating system through copyright assignment. We have been doing this work for thirty-seven years. In order to give us the best position to uphold our commitment to the GNU Project, we need contributors to not only contribute their code, but to do so in a way that keeps the GNU Project legally secure. This is accomplished through the FSF's copyright assignment program .

Because the copyright assignment program is so vital, we feel it is an important topic to revisit from time to time and describe what happens when a contributor assigns copyright to the FSF for a GNU package. First and foremost, it is well worth noting that in this process the contributor gives an altruistic yet practical gift to the free software community in the form of free software. Writing code that protects its users' freedoms is truly an act of kindness which benefits all of society, and assigning copyright to the FSF entrusts us to defend and protect such freedoms. Taking the legal steps to keep such freedoms intact is paramount because software freedom is under constant attack. If the opponents of free software had their way, all software would be proprietary and under the control of a select few. It is fair to say that copylefted , free software has made it difficult for those seeking control over users.

Simply put, copyright assignment is an agreement between the developer and the FSF. By entering into this assignment agreement, the developer's rights as author of a work, which are protected by law, are transferred, and the FSF becomes the new copyright holder. The primary driving force behind this approach is that the FSF can defend the copyright in court, if necessary. This is because only the copyright holder is in a legal position to do so. While this approach keeps the FSF in the best position to uphold the GPL, there are a lot of misconceptions around the process and outcome.

Some developers worry that assigning copyright will strip them of all their rights to the code they've created. To address this, the FSF includes a "license grantback" to the developer in the agreement contract. For the developer, a license grantback means they can continue to modify and share their code, and technically, they could even distribute their software under a different license. In other words, by assigning copyright to the FSF, the developer does not give up any of these sorts of rights.

Another common concern among developers pertains to what exactly is being transferred. The agreement contract makes clear that the author's copyright for changes and/or enhancements to a specific GNU package is what is being transferred, and nothing else. However, the ultimate decision to submit code is firmly left in the hands of the contributor. When the contributor submits code to the GNU Project, this fulfills the requirement to report the changes and/or enhancements covered by the agreement with the FSF. If the contributor decides not to submit their changes and/or enhancements to the project, then the agreement does not apply to that code. What the copyright assignment does not do is force the developer to contribute all code they write. Although it is very rare, the contributor may also send a physical letter enumerating the assigned files to the FSF if they wish to be more formal or specific.

Free software is under constant attack, which is a warning worth repeating. One very real, and very concerning, vector for such an attack is when an employer claims the outside work of their employee, or when a university does the same with a student. The last thing anybody in the free software community needs is an army of well-paid lawyers from a large corporation or university pulling apart code and making copyright claims. In order to prevent this, the FSF requires employer disclaimers from contributors employed to program, and university disclaimers from students enrolled in a university. These help remove the danger of proprietary claims on a developer's contributions to any GNU packages. Although assigning copyright for a specific GNU Project package is a one-time process, a contributing developer may have several jobs throughout their career; therefore, it is important for the developer to get an employer disclaimer in place when starting any new programming job.

I hope this article broadens your understanding of the FSF's copyright assignment program. With this knowledge, I also encourage you to join us and the thousands of hackers around the world who have placed their work's copyright and their trust with the FSF. With the community's contributions securely under the FSF's protection, the FSF can keep a vital promise which is also contained within the agreement: we will always keep the software free.

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What You Should Know About Contributor License Agreements In Open Source Projects

Contributor.

It is not unusual for a commercial software package to consist of millions of lines of code, with customized software combined with preexisting software, such as libraries, interfaces, or services, developed by third parties. Open source projects can provide software developers with a valuable resource for such third-party software. By incorporating these projects into their own code, software developers can reduce inefficiencies that result from writing software libraries that already exist and solving problems that have already been overcome.

An open source project comprises a community of software developers that agree to develop a common software-code base and make it freely available but subject to certain license requirements. The resulting software is typically vetted by multiple contributors to the open source project and may be further updated and improved based on their contributions. Open source software is prevalent in many popular software products, including Mozilla Firefox, Wordpress, GNU/Linux, Android mobile devices, Open Java Development Kit (OpenJDK), and even commercial products like Apple's OS X.

There are different views about how an open source project should manage the ownership and licensing of copyrights for individual software contributions to the project. One option is for an author (copyright holder) of such software to retain ownership of the software's copyright but contribute it under an open source license defined by the project. If the open source project is managed by a single entity (“maintainer”), the author instead may license the software copyright to the project's maintainer, which in turn releases the software under the project's open source license. In another option, the author of the software contribution may assign ownership of the software copyright to the maintainer, which releases the software under the project's open source license. Of course, another option is not to define any specific policy for licensing or ownership of software contributions to the project.

One way of managing the rights associated with contributions is through a Contributor License Agreement (CLA), sometimes referred to as a “contribution agreement.” There is some disagreement, however, in the open source community about whether a CLA should be required of individual contributors. A CLA may be used to define the legal terms, such as rights and obligations of the contributor, that apply to contributions (usually software) to the open source project. The CLA, for example, may require the contributor to grant a copyright license in the contribution to the open source project, its maintainer, and/or downstream recipients. Because CLAs are not standardized, contributions to different open source projects may be subject to different CLAs or none at all. While smaller, informal open source projects may not require CLAs, such as for hobbyist groups coordinating through a GitHub repository, larger projects, often backed by one or more corporations, may require formal CLA agreements from its contributors. Several well-known open source projects, such as The Apache Software Foundation, Django Software Foundation, Eclipse Foundation, just to name a few, require CLAs.

As discussed further below, open source projects have to weigh the pros and cons of requiring its individual contributors to sign a CLA. Here, we summarize some of the factors to consider when deciding whether a CLA would be appropriate for an open source project.

Contributor License Agreements

There are several choices of how to implement a CLA. Some projects may opt for a short and simple CLA agreement, while others may choose a more detailed legal instrument. Further, some projects may require separate CLAs for individual and corporate contributors. While CLAs can take many different forms, here are some provisions that are often included.

In general, a CLA is used to grant sufficient rights to the open source project to allow it to release a software contribution under the project's open source license(s). In a simple case, the CLA may require each contributor to assign ownership of the copyright in the contribution to the open source project. The assignment may be coupled with a nonexclusive license granted back to the contributor, a “grant-back license,” which gives the original author permission to copy, modify, or distribute the contribution and its derivative works under the grant-back license. The Free Software Foundation, for example, uses this approach for some of its GNU projects, allowing a single maintainer to own and enforce the copyrights for the project's software.

More common, however, a CLA includes a copyright license that enables the author of the contribution to retain ownership of the copyright, which may be more desirable from the contributor's perspective. The copyright license in the CLA cannot be more restrictive than the open source license used to distribute the project's code. For example, if the open source project distributes its code under a “permissive” copyright license, such as the MIT or BSD license, then its CLA cannot require software contributions under a more restrictive license, such as a “copyleft” GPL license. Doing so would impose additional restrictions that would preclude distribution under the project's permissive license and undermine the original intent of the permissive license.

In addition, a CLA typically requires the contributor to make certain representations and warranties, which may include one or more of:

• the contributor is the author of the contribution;
• the contributor has the legal right to grant the copyright license;
• the contributor does not have an employer that can claim rights in the copyright;
• the contribution is an original work;
• the contribution is not subject to third-party licenses, claims, suits, or actions.

 The CLA also may include certain disclaimers by the contributor. For example, the CLA may state that the contributor provides the contribution on an “As Is” basis, without any express or implied warranties as to title, non-infringement, merchantability, and/or fitness for a particular purpose. The CLA may disclaim any express or implied warranties that would require the contributor to provide ongoing technical support for the contribution.

Some CLAs further require the contributor to grant a patent license that prevents the author of a contribution to the open source project from later alleging patent infringement based on the contribution. The Google Individual CLA is an example of a contribution agreement including such a patent license.

As seen above, a CLA is essentially a legal contract that can be customized for a particular open source project. While the CLA can set forth certain rights and obligations for a contributor based on their contribution to an open source project, it can also include restrictions on how the project itself may license and distribute the contribution.

Benefits of Using a CLA

A CLA can provide several advantages for an open source project having multiple contributors. By expressly describing rights and obligations of contributors, the open source project, and/or maintainer, the CLA can protect each of the project's participants from disputes regarding licensing or ownership of software contributions. For projects where the contributors include employees of collaborating corporations, the CLA can also provide peace of mind to the corporate employers that certain legal protections are in place to reduce the possibility of intellectual-property disputes based on their employees' contributions to the project.

The CLA also provides legal assurances for the open source project and its maintainer. The open source project, for example, can rely on representations and warranties in the CLA that a contributor has the right to make the contribution, has the right to grant a copyright license to the contribution, and is not precluded from making the contribution based on any intellectual-property rights of an employer. CLAs that include a patent license can protect the open source project, its maintainer, and downstream recipients of an open source contribution from the contributor later alleging patent infringement based on making, using, selling, offering for sale, or importing the contribution.

The CLA can also include other provisions that may be beneficial for the open source project over the long term, such as to address who will be responsible for enforcing the open source license in the event of copyright infringement and any preferred alternative dispute resolution or governing law that should apply. The CLA could also clarify if it applies to contributions to only certain software in an open source project, the entire open source code base, or across multiple projects maintained by the same entity. Further, the CLA may include provisions that would permit the open source project to change open source licenses over time without having to seek authorization from each of its contributors before making the change. The CLA also could authorize the open source project to distribute the contribution simultaneously under separate licenses, such as an open source and proprietary licenses, depending on whether the code will be used commercially. Oracle's MySQL is an example of an open source project with such a dual-license approach.

Another advantage of using a CLA is that it provides a formal mechanism for the open source project to keep track of its contributors and contributions. Each contributor may provide identifying information in the CLA that can allow the project maintainer to keep track of who are the primary contributors to the project, where they are employed, and other statistical information regarding the project's contributions.

To assist maintainers, there are several publicly-available examples of CLAs and related management tools that can be used to implement a CLA based on the particular needs of an open source project.

Even without a CLA, open source projects can leverage the policies of popular online code repositories like GitHub. GitHub projects can benefit from the default “inbound=outbound” contribution policy in GitHub's Terms of Service. According to this policy, whenever a contributor makes a contribution to any GitHub repository containing notice of a license, the contributor agrees to license the contribution under the same terms. If, however, the GitHub repository for the open source project provides a separate contribution agreement, that CLA will supersede GitHub's default “inbound=outbound” policy. Thus, even absent a CLA, the open source project can rely on this GitHub contribution policy to ensure that any contributions to the project can be released under the project's open source license.

Disadvantages of Using a CLA

There may be compelling reasons why an open source project may not want to use a CLA. A common criticism of CLAs is their potential to discourage contributions to the open source project. A legal contract defining rights and obligations, and potential liabilities, associated with a contribution can be intimidating to software developers who simply want to contribute minor bug fixes or other refinements to existing open source code. Creating additional barriers prior to allowing contribution can disincentivize those who would otherwise contribute.

Additionally, individual contributors may be deterred from agreeing to the terms of a CLA if they do not understand the legalities or consequences of signing the agreement (online or offline) or otherwise agreeing to its terms. Without legal representation, individual contributors may perceive the CLA terms as coercive or unfair. Corporate contributors also may be hesitant to agree to a CLA or allowing their employees to agree to a CLA before seeking authorization from their legal counsel. Yet other contributors may prefer to remain anonymous, which may not be possible when a project requires a CLA. As a result, potential contributors may choose not to make helpful software contributions to the open source project because of fear, misunderstanding, or inconvenience associated with signing the CLA.

Another possible disadvantage is the administrative overhead required to catalog and maintain a database of CLAs received for each contribution in an open source project. For projects having a large number of contributions and/or contributors, this can be a non-trivial task. Further still, it can be difficult to police when contributions have been received without a corresponding CLA and how to handle such submissions.

Other arguments against CLAs suggest an “inbound=outbound” contribution policy should be implied when a contribution is made to an open source project, thus mooting the need for a CLA. While the GitHub Terms of Service expressly defines such a contribution policy as its default, the “inbound=outbound” policy may not be a safe assumption for open source projects hosted on other platforms. Further, although a licensor delivering an original work requested by a licensee for distribution may imply a nonexclusive copyright license, it is unclear whether a court would find that a voluntary contribution to an open source project creates an implied copyright license or an implied “inbound=outbound” policy.

A CLA also may not be necessary if the open source project instead chooses to use a Developer Certificate of Origin (DCO). The DCO was created by the Linux Foundation as a concise statement for a contributor to certify that they either created their contribution or are otherwise authorized to submit it to open source project and agree that their contribution may be distributed under the project's open source license(s). In a sense, the DCO is like a lightweight CLA that may be more appealing to contributors who would otherwise refuse to sign a CLA with more comprehensive terms.

A CLA can provide a useful tool for providing clarity and defining certain rights and obligations that apply to contributions in an open source project. They can help maintain the integrity of the project and protect the project from potential legal exposure, particularly when multiple corporate entities are involved. CLAs, however, may not be ideal for every project. They can include legal terms that require review and sign-off by lawyers and also may require substantial administrative overhead for the maintainer of the project. CLAs may find particular usefulness in larger projects, having many contributions and contributors, that will persist for a long time. But CLAs may have less utility for relatively smaller or less formal open source communities where the code base is created by only a few contributors. Ultimately, the needs of a particular open source project will dictate whether or not a CLA will be beneficial and the specific CLA provisions that should be included.

The content of this article is intended to provide a general guide to the subject matter. Specialist advice should be sought about your specific circumstances.

Intellectual Property

United states.

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Comparative Analysis of Copyright Assignment and Licence Formalities for Open Source Contributor Agreements

(2013) 10:2 SCRIPTed 207

24 Pages Posted: 28 Sep 2013

Andrés Guadamuz

University of Sussex

Andrew Rens

Intellectual Property Law Research, University of Cape Town

Date Written: September 1, 2013

This article discusses formal requirements in open source software contributor copyright assignment and licensing agreements. Contributor agreements are contracts by which software developers transfer or license their work on behalf of an open source project. This is done for convenience and enforcement purposes, and usually takes the form of a formal contract. This work conducts a comparative analysis of how several jurisdicitons regard those agreements. We specifically look at the formal requirements across those countries to ascertain whether formalities are constitutive or probative. We then look at the consequences of the lack of formalities for the validity of those contributor agreements.

Keywords: open source, contributory agreements, copyright, formalities

JEL Classification: K10

Suggested Citation: Suggested Citation

Andres Guadamuz (Contact Author)

University of sussex ( email ).

Falmer Brighton, BN1 9QN United Kingdom

Intellectual Property Law Research, University of Cape Town ( email )

Private Bag X3 Rondebosch, Western Cape 7701 South Africa

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Comparative analysis of copyright assignment and licence formalities for Open Source Contributor Agreements

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• https://doi.org/10.2966/scrip.100213.207

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Comparative Analysis of copyright assignment and licence formalities for Open Source Contributor Agreements

• August 2013
• SCRIPT-ed 10(2):207-230
• 10(2):207-230

• University of Sussex

• Full Texts at http://andrewrens.com/scholarship/

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You are here for one of two reasons. You either want to understand more about the concept of copyrights and how it relates to open source or you want to know what to put in the header of your code before you publish it. If you are here for the latter, skip to the practical content below.

An Overview of Concepts

Copyright is a collection of rights protected by the government that applies to original works of authorship fixed in any tangible medium of expression. These rights ensure the copyright owner can decide who can copy the work. Yet this gets much more complicated.

What if there was no copyright protection? You author a work (i.e. write a novel, compose a song, create an app), and someone wants to use it without your permission. Perhaps the sovereign emperor of the land likes your novel and decides to publish it for you, (maybe without including your name or paying you). Perhaps someone who hacks into your computer decides to share an app you were planning on selling with the world (maybe before you were ready) and make money from it themselves. Technically you still have your property – it was not stolen in the way a car is stolen. Your rights were infringed. Your agency was taken away. Copyright is the set of laws that protect your rights in these situations.

What Does Copyright Protect?

Copyright laws are complicated. It’s best to seek legal advice when it comes to details. This is not legal advice. With that said, you can find information online that helps explain copyright protection as it pertains to your jurisdiction. This page lists rights protected by US copyright laws. For example, someone infringes your copyright if they copy your work to use it, modify it to make a derivative work, and/or distribute it, or the derived work without your consent.

What Does Copyright Not Protect?

That’s more complicated to address. There are a few carve-outs to note: Copyright does not protect ideas, processes, or concepts. You now see that source code, being protected by copyright, is viewed more as a literary work than a procedure. Copyright does not protect works that are trivial or too small for protection. e.g. No court will protect my claim that I authored the three word phrase “Roses are Red.” Moreover, copyright protection excludes a category of infringement known as fair use where someone copies a small part of your work for use we consider socially acceptable (e.g. including an excerpt in a book review).

Copyright and Open Source

When developers want to share their code and get others to use it, modify it, and distribute it, they should make explicit that they are doing this by intent. Why? By default if you say nothing, anyone taking your code is infringing your copyright. You should tell them it’s okay to use and under what conditions. You do that in a license . In a commercial transaction, someone pays you for license rights. In an open source project, you simply declare the license and now everyone will know they can use, modify, and redistribute your code under the license terms you specified.

Open Source as a Legal Construct

Open source means different things to different people. From a legal perspective, open source refers to work that is shared under a license that complies with the open source definition as managed by the Open Source Initiative . The open source definition specifies what makes an open source license open. Similarly, the Free Software Foundation manages the free software definition which specifies the “four freedoms” that are sought by the Free Software movement.

Note: There is overlap between free software and open source , hence the acronym FOSS (or F/LOSS: adding libre as a reminder that free in this context refers to freedoms, not to the absence of cost). There are differences between the two definitions that they remain distinct.

The Pragmatics

What should you put in your code.

First read the section Prepare your Publication page in this guide. Note: this guidance is for code we write at work. We never remove someone else’s copyright statement. We only add our copyright statements to code we write. Let’s cover four cases:

Existing code that you are not modifying

Existing code that you are modifying, new code that we are publishing.

• New code that we are not planning to publish

If you’ve published open source code at one of the Yahoo legacy brands, your code will contain a copyright declaration that looks like: Copyright 2014, Yahoo Inc. or Copyright 2014, Aol Inc. etc.

Even though we are now Yahoo , you do not need to change the copyright notice text on code that was already published. The code previously published was marked correctly at the time. We don’t have to change anything about that – in fact it would be incorrect to change it. Copyright statements are not a freshness date, they are more like a timestamp.

When modifying one of our existing open source projects, you don’t need to alter the copyright header. You can remove the year since we no longer display years on the copyright line. Don’t add a date range (e.g. 2012-2017). You can update the copyright entity name from “Oath Inc.” to “Yahoo Inc.” if you prefer, but you don’t have to. If the copyright entity is “Verizon”, “Verizon Media”, or any other name belonging to Verizon, please update the entity name to one appropriate to Yahoo Inc.

Yahoo Inc. is the name we now use on the copyright header of new projects we publish. When you add a new file to an existing open source project or publish a new project, you’ll add a copyright header to it. New code should have the following text block above to the top of each source code file that was written by employees (and not computer generated).

New code that we are not publishing

We do not require internal code to include a copyright statement. But it’s a good idea to have one since internal code can become published external code (on purpose or by accident). Having an accurate copyright statement helps. It’s good practice to add a header when creating new files. Also, some IDEs automatically put one in, so please configure it to use the right one.

The header should contain a copyright statement ( Copyright Yahoo Inc. ) followed by the statement that indicates this is proprietary code ( All rights reserved. ). In the event we open source that code at a future date, we will then replace the All rights reserved. text with a license indicator that the code is licensed under an open source license (as shown above).

Using your name on the copyright header

Company code should not list the engineer’s name in the copyright notice. The engineer is the author of the code, but code written for work is assigned to the company. Your code should only list your name as the copyright holder if you processed a copyright assignment with the OSPO and legal or if we have established an exceptional situation where this makes sense to do. Otherwise the code copyright should declare Yahoo Inc. as the copyright holder. It does not matter if code is published on a personal repo, as the copyright is an attribute of the code, not the repo.

James Bottomley's random Pages

A collection of information, owning your own copyrights in open source.

This article covers several aspects: owning the copyrights you develop outside of your employed time and the more thorny aspect of owning the copyrights in open source projects you work on for your employer. It will also take a look at the middle ground of being a contract entity doing paid work on open source. This article follows the historical sweep of my journey through this field and so some aspects may be outdated and all are within the bounds of the US legal system and it’s most certainly not complete, just a description of what I did and what I learned.

Why Should you Own your Own Source code?

In the early days of open source, everything was a hobby project and everyone owned their own contributions. Owning your own contribution was a sort of mark of franchise in the project. Of course, there were some projects, notably the FSF ones, which didn’t believe in distributed ownership and insisted you contribute ownership of your copyrights to them so they could look after the project for you. Obviously, since I’m a Linux Kernel developer and with the Linux Kernel being a huge distributed copyright project, it’s easy to see which side of the argument I fall.

The main rights you give up if you don’t own the code you create are the right to re-licence and the right to enforce. It probably hadn’t occurred to you that if you actually find a licence violation in a project you contribute to for your employer, you’ll have no standing to demand that the problem get addressed. In fact, any enforcement on the code would have to be done by the proper owner: your employer. Plus your employer can control the ultimate destination of that ownership, including selling your code to a copyright troll if they so wished … while you may trust your employer now you work for them, do you trust them to do the right thing for all time, especially since they may be bought out by EvilCorp on down the road?

The relicensing problem can also be thorny: as a strong open source contributor you’ve likely been on the receiving end of requests to relicense (“I really like the code in your project X and would like to incorporate it in my open source project Y, but there’s a licence compatibility problem, would you dual license it?”) and thought nothing about saying “yes”. However, if your employer owns the code, you were likely lying when you said “yes” because you have no relicensing rights and you must ask your employer for permission to do the relicensing.

All the above points up the dangers in the current ecosystem. Project contributors often behave like they own the code but if they don’t they can be leaving a legal minefield in their wakes. The way to fix this is to own your own code … or at least understand the limitations of your rights if you don’t.

Open Source in Your Own Time

It’s a mistake to think that just because you work on something in your own time it isn’t actually owned by your employer. Historically, at least in the US, employment agreements contain incredibly broad provisions for invention ownership which basically try to claim anything you invent at any hour of the day or night that might be even vaguely related to your employment. Not unnaturally this caused huge volumes of litigation around startups where former employees successfully develop innovations their prior employer declined to pursue (at least until it started making money). This has lead to a slew of state based legal safe harbour protections for employee inventions. Most of them, like the Illinois Statute I first used, have similar wording

A provision in an employment agreement which provides that an employee shall assign or offer to assign any of the employee’s rights in an invention to the employer does not apply to an invention for which no equipment, supplies, facilities, or trade secret information of the employer was used and which was developed entirely on the employee’s own time … is … void and unenforceable. 765 ILCS 1060/2

In fact most states now require the wording to appear in the employment contract, so you likely don’t have to look up the statute to figure out what to do. The biggest requirements are that it be on your own time and you not be using any employer equipment, so the most important thing is to make sure you have your own laptop or computer. If you follow the requirements to the letter, you should be safe enough in owning your own time open source code. However, if you really want a guarantee you need to take extra precautions.

Own Time Open Source Carve Outs in Employment agreements

When you join a company, one of the things you’ll sign is a prior invention disclosure form, usually as an appendix to the invention assignment agreement as part of your employment contract. Here’s an example one from the SEC database (ironically for a Chinese subsidiary). Look particularly at section 2(a) “Inventions Retained and Licensed”. It’s basically pure CYA for the company, and most people leave Exhibit A blank, but you shouldn’t do that. What you should do is list all your current and future (by doing sweeping guesswork) own open source projects. The most useful clause in 2(a) says “I agree that I will not incorporate any Prior Inventions into any products …” so you and your employer have now agreed that all the listed projects are outside the scope of your employment agreement.

As far as I can tell, no-one really looks at Exhibit A at all, so I’ve been really general and put things like “The Linux Kernel” and “Open Source UEFI software” “Open Source cryptography such as gnupg, openssl and gnutls” and never been challenged on it.

One legitimate question, which will probably happen if your carve outs are very broad, is what happens if your employer specifically asks you to work on a project you’ve declared in Exhibit A? Ideally you could use this as an opportunity to negotiate an addendum to your contract covering your ownership of open source. However, if you don’t want to rock the boat, you can simply do nothing and rely on the fact that the agreement has something to say about this. The sample section 2(a) above goes on to give your employer a non-exclusive licence, which you could take as agreement to your continued ownership of the copyrights in the code, even through your employer is now instructing you (and paying you) to work on it. However, the say nothing approach has never been tested in court and may be vulnerable to challenge, so a safer course is to send your manager an email pointing out the issue and proposing to follow the licence in the employment contract. If they do nothing, thinking the matter settled, as most managers do, then you have legal cover for continuing to own your own copyrights. You can make it as vague as you like, so using the above sample agreement, something like “You’ve asked me to work on Project X which was listed in Exhibit A of my employment agreement. To move forward, I’m happy to licence all future works on this project to you under the terms of section 2(a)”. It looks innocuous, but it’s actually a statement that your company doesn’t get copyright ownership because of the actual wording in section 2(a) says the company gets a non-exclusive licence if you incorporate any works listed in Exhibit A. Remember to save the email somewhere safe (and any reply which is additional proof it was seen) just in case.

Owning Open Source Produced on Company Time

The first thing to note is that if your employer pays for you to work on open source, absent any side agreement, the code that you produce will be owned by your employer. This isn’t some US specific thing, this is a general principle of employment the world over (they pay you, so they own it). So even if you work in Europe, your employer will still own your open source copyrights if they pay you to work on the project, moral rights arguments notwithstanding. The only way to change this is to get some sort of explicit or implicit (if you want to go the carve out route above) agreement about the ownership.

Although I’ve negotiated both joint and exclusive ownership of open source via employment agreements, the actual agreements are still the property of the relevant corporations and thus, unfortunately, while I can describe some of the elements, I can’t publish the text (employment agreements are the crown jewels the HR dragons guard).

How to Negotiate

Most employers (or at least their lawyers) will refuse point blank to change the wording of employment agreements. However, what you want can be a side agreement and usually doesn’t require rewording the employment agreement at all. All you need is the understanding that the side agreement will get executed. One big problem can be that most negotiations over employment agreements occur with people from HR, which is a department with the least understanding of open source, so you don’t want to be negotiating the side agreement with them, you want to talk to the person that is hiring you. You also need to present your request as reasonable, so find out if anyone inside your prospective new company has done something similar. Often they have, and they’ll likely be someone in open source you’ve at least heard of so you can approach them and ask for details. “But you gave a copyright ownership side agreement to X” is often a great way to advance your cause. Don’t be afraid to ask and argue politely but firmly … hiring talented developers is very competitive nowadays so they have (or at least the manager who wants to hire you has) a vested interest in keeping you happy.

Consider Joint Ownership

Joint ownership is a specific legal term meaning the rights in a copyright are shared by the joint owners. Effectively this sharing means that either party may enforce without consulting the other and either party may license the work without consulting the other (but here they must share any profits from the licence equally among joint owners).

Joint ownership is often a good solution because it gives you the right to relicence and the right to enforce, while also giving your employer a share in what they paid to produce. Joint ownership is often far easier to sell to corporations than one or other of you having exclusive ownership because it gives them all the rights they would have had anyway. The only slight concern you may have down the road is it does give them the right to relicence or sell on their ownership, say to an open core business or to an enforcement troll. However, the good news is that as joint owner you now have a right to a half share of any profit they (and the new owner) make out of such a rights transfer, which can potentially act as a deterrent to the transaction if you remind them of this requirement.

Open Source as a Contractor

In some ways this is the best relationship. There are no work for hire assumptions about companies you contract for owning your free time, so doing other open source projects is easy. However, a contractor is bound by whatever contract you sign, so you need someone with legal training to help you make sure it is actually equitable. You can’t get around this legal requirement: the protections that exist for employees don’t exist for contractors, so if you sign a contract saying in exchange for a certain sum company X owns the entirety of your output, you will be bound by it. So remember: read the contract and negotiate the terms.

Copyright Ownership as a Contractor

Surprisingly, in a relationship where you’re contracted to get something upstream, it’s often in the client’s best interest to have the contractor own the copyrights in Open Source. It means the contractor is responsible for all the nitty gritty of pushing patches and dealing with contribution agreements and the client simply gets the end product: the thing they wanted upstream. I’ve found this a surprisingly easy sell to most legal departments. Even if the client does want some sort of ownership of the code, you can offer joint ownership as the easy route to you taking on all the hassle and them getting the benefits of ownership.

Trade Secrets

As a contractor, you’ll likely be forced to sign an NDA never to reveal client secrets. This is pretty usual, but the pitfall in open source, particularly if you’re doing a driver for a device whose programming manual is under NDA, is that you are going to be revealing them contrary to the NDA. You need this handled in an equitable fashion in the contract to avoid unpleasant problems long after the job is done. The simplest phrase you need is something like “Client understands that open source is developed in public and authorizes that all information necessary to producing X under this contract be disclosed to the public”.

Patents can be a huge minefield with contract open source, because as a contractor who owns the copyrights and negotiates the contribution agreements, you have no authority to bind your client’s patents. You really don’t want to find yourself being used as a conduit for a patent ambush on open source (where a client contracts with you to put code into a project which reads on a patent they hold and then turns around and patent trolls the ecosystem) so you need contract language binding the client patents at least in the work you’re doing for them. Something simple like “Client grants a perpetual and irrevocable licence, consistent with the terms of the open source licence for X, to all contributions made by contractor to X that read on patents client holds now or may in future acquire”. This latter is pretty narrow, so you could start out by trying to get a patent licence for the entirety of project X and negotiate down from there.

Conclusions

Owning your own copyrights in open source is possible provided you’re careful. The strategies outlined above are based on my own experiences (all in the US) as a contract employee from 1995-2008 there after as a regular employee but are not the only ones you could pursue, so ask around to see what others have done as well. The main problem with all the strategies above is that they work well when you’re negotiating your employment. If you’re already working at some corporation they’re unlikely to be helpful to you unless you really have a simple own time open source project. Oh, and just remember that while the snippets I quoted above for the contract case may actually have been in contracts I signed, this isn’t legal advice and you should have a lawyer advise you how best to incorporate the various points raised.

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The New License and New Joint Copyright Assignment

• A new documentation license
• A new copyright assignment

A New Documentation License

As you know, OpenOffice.org has historically used a dual license strategy for source code: the LGPL and SISSL. Both of these licenses allow for Open Source work to be done. They also allow for commercialization. However, neither is particularly good for documents that are meant to be modified by other people and used on the website or in publications.

So, over the last few months we (a group including Sun and OpenOffice.org volunteers) have worked together to craft a new license, the Public Document License, for meeting these needs. This new license permits the free modification of documents covered by it, thereby encouraging collaboration on documents posted to the OpenOffice.org website.

A New Copyright Assignment

Since its beginning, OpenOffice.org has required committers to CVS (including website content) to sign over their copyright to Sun to ensure there is a single entity holding copyright. The code is of course governed by the Open Source licenses. But the Copyright Assignment, as it is known, does not accommodate contributors who wish to retain copyright over their contributions.

Thus, the new Joint Copyright Assignment. Under the JCA, developers may now also keep all rights to any code and related material they commit to the source. Everyone benefits from this strategy: developers may do as they please with their code and at the same time a single, coherent entity jointly holds the copyright for the OpenOffice.org source. This is important for instance in the case of legal defense.

The new copyright structure also makes it easier for people to contribute to the website. People no longer need to fill out a copyright assignment to submit material to the website; the PDL is adequate for this purpose.

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Question Regarding Copyright Issue For An Open Source Project [closed]

I am an author of an Open Source project, which is released under GPL2. I start to work on it alone for 2 years.

In every of my source code files, I attach the following information on the top of it.

Now, the project is getting attention from the public. There are increasing number of programmers are joining in. I was wondering :

(1) When there is a programmer modify my original source code file, do I need to add his name in the copyright section. But, with the increasing number of programmer, isn't that will keep the header almost unreadable? For example :

• Copyright (C) 2009 Yan Cheng Cheok , John

(2) If a programmer add a new source code file, the source code copyright shall belong to whom? Me? Or him?

(3) If there is a mixed copyright source code in a project, say,

A.c, B.c, C.c source code file is copyrighted Yan Cheng Cheok D.c, E.c, F.c source code file is copyrighted John

Will there be an issue? Say, in the future, John decide to switch D.c, E.c, F.c using different license, and Yan Cheng Cheok doesn't agree with it...... Who will have a final say then?

In order to avoid this type of conflict, shall I enforce all commited source code shall be copyright under me? But, I also do not want the new developer feel that his work is not being credited properly.

(4) Is there really to have "year" in the copyright information? If I put 2009, does that mean in 2010, I am no longer holding the copyright?

• 1 If your copyright says "2009" but someone else has the same file from 2008, then you are in trouble. In 2010, since 2010 comes after 2009, you still have copyright. –  jrockway Commented Jul 31, 2009 at 3:53

4 Answers 4

I am not a lawyer, but I have been looking into this.

As an author of software, be it a patch or a new bit of functionality you hold full copyright to your source code. You can decide how to license it or who to license it to.

When someone contributes source to your project you should at least get an email from them saying what terms their code is licensed under. For example, if you have an MIT project, and someone contributes a patch that is GPL, you are in a pretty big pickle. To accept it you would have to re-license your project under the GPL.

So, first things first:

• Get something in writing from the contributor that explains what license his contribution is covered under.

Lots of open source projects would like the leverage to change open source licenses, say for example you want to re-license under GPLv3. You will have to contact every contributor to do that, some of them may be unreachable, and again you will be in a bit of a pickle.

To combat that many large open source projects have a JCA (Joint Copyright Assignment), which in tech speak mean: "All your contributions belong to us" (See for example suns contributor agreement: http://www.openoffice.org/licenses/sca.pdf )

When a JCA is in place your source can have the simple copyright: "Copyright (C) 2009 Yan Cheng Cheok [email protected] " because you are the copyright holder.

If there is no JCA in place I think stuff is a little messy, you need to amend the files and place the right contributor names on the right files. Or better still only maintain a single License.txt and have all the acknowledgments in one spot.

So to avoid all this hassle the easiest thing is to:

• Get a JCA in place

The year on the copyright doc does not mean it expires in the subsequent year.

• JCA does help. I had draft a JCA for my own usage. –  Cheok Yan Cheng Commented Aug 6, 2009 at 3:32

You might consider removing this clause:

as it changes your rights based on any future changes to the license.

I am not a lawyer, but once someone provides you a copy of their source code under a specific copyright, they would have a difficult time to change the license on you.

If they implemented a brand new file, I'd let them put their copyright on the file.

You can update the years in your copyright file every year.

Nolo press has excellent books on copyright issues. If you are concerned, get a lawyer.

Changes made by other contributors are copyright the author. When the contributors give you those changes, you are able to redistribute them under the GPL. What you can't do is relicense the contributors' changes under GPL-incompatible terms.

As far as contributors deciding to change licenses, that shouldn't be a problem. Once you have contributions under e.g. the GPL, a contributor can stop giving out new copies of their code but they can't take back the copy you already have.

Each contributor would own the copyright to the parts that they wrote, but that shouldn't be a big issue.

John could not take back his code after he's already released it under the GPL, but he could rerelease it under another license, or create a non-GPL fork of it, assuming that every line of code in that fork is his, or he has permission from the other contributors.

If someone steals the project, in violation of the GPL, you can still go after them for the portions of it that you wrote, and other developers can do the same for theirs.

Some large open source projects require copyright assignment from contributors, to ensure their ability to protect the project as a whole, and their ability to relicense the project in the future without going back and getting permission from every past contributor. http://www.gnu.org/licenses/why-assign.html http://wiki.services.openoffice.org/wiki/SCA

Not the answer you're looking for? Browse other questions tagged licensing or ask your own question .

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Saddened and bewildered by academic copyright assignments

Opensource.com

Karl Fogel reminded me to check the copyright assignment for the scholarly papers I'm starting to submit on Teaching Open Source (TOS), particularly POSSE . I sat down and did some digging, and here's what I found--keep in mind these are the notes of an unschooled grad student new to the topic, uneducated on copyright and new to academic publishing -- let me know if your experiences have involved other interpretations of these policies. In fact, I'm posting these assertions in the hope that people will correct me if I've made mistakes (and I will edit this post and provide attribution for the edits).

TOS currently publishes and presents mostly within three academic venues: IEEE and ASEE , who co-host the Frontiers in Education (FIE) conference each year, and ACM , within which SIGCSE and the CS education conference by the same name are hosted.

Here's what I've found about their policies. I don't understand them very well, but what I think I do understand is depressing.

IEEE: Copyright assignment policy for FIE 2011 (pdf) Summary: You must assign the copyright to IEEE upon submission. They own everything.

Excerpt (emphasis mine):

The requirements in this Section shall apply to all manuscripts  submitted to IEEE journals, transactions, letters, magazines, and conference publications... An author includes a completed IEEE Copyright Form during submission of the manuscript to an IEEE publication and thereby transfers the copyright of the manuscript to IEEE.

Submitted. Not accepted, submitted. If you want IEEE to consider your documents for publication, you have to hand them copyright assignments before they'll even look at it. Even if they turn your paper down, they still own its copyright.

IEEE'S policy for permitting posting of IEEE-copyrighted articles...extends only to authors and their employers and IEEE organizational units. IEEE policy does not permit third parties to post IEEE-copyrighted material without obtaining a license or permission from the IEEE.

I can post a pdf of my article on my website, and I've been told by many academics do so, which is a step in the right direction, but insufficient. Nobody else can post or share it, so you're limited to one distribution node (yourself) with very limited rights.

Authors shall not post the final, published versions of their papers.

Wait, but then what can I post? Apparently the "accepted version of IEEE-copyrighted articles," but I can't see what the difference should be between the accepted version and the published one. Layout?

Before submitting an article to an IEEE publication, authors frequently post their manuscripts to their own web site... [to invite] constructive comment from colleagues. Upon submission of an article to IEEE, an author is required to transfer copyright in the article to IEEE, and the author must update any previously posted version of the article with a prominently displayed IEEE copyright notice. ...Upon publication of an article by the IEEE, the author must replace any previously posted electronic versions of the article...including the IEEE copyright notice and full citation, with a link to the final, published article in IEEE Xplore.  

All copies and versions of your paper that exist prior to submission and publication need to be ASSIMILATED BY THE BORG.

SIGCSE: Copyright policy statement Summary: You must assign the copyright to ACM upon acceptance in order to be published. They own everything.

ACM requires authors to assign their copyrights to ACM as a condition of publishing the work.

This is a little better. It's upon acceptance, not submission, meaning that if they turn you down, you still hold copyright to your own work. Still.

While some other publishers have adopted licensing arrangements, ACM relies on copyright transfer. ACM finds copyright transfer more straightforward and easier to administer. In licensing arrangements, all the specific acts for which permission is sought must be forseen and stipulated. A transfer with an explicit set of author-retained rights is less likely to lead to false assumptions about what the "owner" may do with the work after signing an exclusive permissions license.

I found this section fascinating; it starts with same rationalization that Creative Commons does--namely, "the internet changes everything by making information distribution dramatically easier; we can't foresee what will happen in a rapidly changing future, and it's encumbering to have to keep going back to ask permission from original authors every time we want to do something to their work." Creative Commons continues by saying, "and so the authors lay out clearly what they will and won't permit, and we're all set," while this copyright assignment finishes with, "so we'll take the copyright for ourselves, so everyone will just have to ask us ."

The entire section "2.5 Rights Retained by Authors and Original Copyright Holders" was an interesting read. At its most basic, it gives you the right to post what you've written on your own site (though, like the IEEE policy, others may not redistribute it). With the IANAL caveat applying to the rest of this post, this section also appears to state that you can post works to a public location  only before copyright transfer. Does this mean that if you don't remember to put it out there before handing ACM the copyright, you can't post it publicly at all?

I turn up with empty hands here, unable to find a blanket copyright policy. The only thing I found was a description of the ASEE Prism copyright policy -- not the policy or assignment statements themselves, nor an indication of what applies to other ASEE publications. Anyone have better luck?

</depressing>

On a happier note, I've spent some time these past few days talking with librarians and checking policies on copyright; that's still a learning journey in progress, but I will retain the copyright for my dissertation and therefore plan on releasing it CC-BY-SA . Similar policies seem to be in state for other universities; I haven't yet found a counterexample that would not allow you to retain copyright (and thus open-license) your thesis, but I have not looked very hard.

Still, on the whole, this state of affairs saddens and confuses me. Fortunately, I've started talking with two of Purdue's engineering librarians, one of whom is also a grad student in my department, and there are ways to navigate this (for instance, sign the form and attach amendments taking back a bunch of rights); I just have to learn them. I'll write them up here as I do.

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US Record Labels Sue AI Music Generators Suno and Udio for Copyright Infringement

The music industry has officially declared war on Suno and Udio, two of the most prominent AI music generators. A group of music labels including Universal Music Group, Warner Music Group, and Sony Music Group has filed lawsuits in US federal court on Monday morning alleging copyright infringement on a “massive scale.”

The plaintiffs seek damages up to $150,000 per work infringed. The lawsuit against Suno is filed in Massachusetts, while the case against Udio’s parent company Uncharted Inc. was filed in New York. Suno and Udio did not immediately respond to a request to comment.

“Unlicensed services like Suno and Udio that claim it’s ‘fair’ to copy an artist’s life’s work and exploit it for their own profit without consent or pay set back the promise of genuinely innovative AI for us all,” Recording Industry Association of America chair and CEO Mitch Glazier said in a press release.

The companies have not publicly disclosed what they trained their generators on. Ed Newton-Rex, a former AI executive who now runs the ethical AI nonprofit Fairly Trained , has written extensively about his experiments with Suno and Udio ; Newton-Rex found that he could generate music that “bears a striking resemblance to copyright songs.” In the complaints, the music labels state that they were independently able to prompt Suno into producing outputs that “match” copyrighted work from artists ranging from ABBA to Jason Derulo.

One example provided in the lawsuit describes how the labels generated songs extremely similar to Chuck Berry’s 1958 rock hit “Johnny B. Goode” in Suno by using prompts like “1950s rock and roll, rhythm & blues, 12 bar blues, rockabilly, energetic male vocalist, singer guitarist,” along with snippets of the song’s lyrics. One song almost exactly replicated the “Go, Johnny, go” chorus; the plaintiffs attached side-by-side transcriptions of the scores and argued that such overlap was only possible because Suno had trained on copyrighted work.

The Udio lawsuit offers similar examples, noting that the labels were able to generate a dozen outputs resembling Mariah Carey’s perennial hit “All I Want for Christmas Is You.” It also offers a side-by-side comparison of music and lyrics, and notes that Mariah Carey soundalikes generated by Udio have already caught the attention of the public .

RIAA chief legal officer Ken Doroshow says Suno and Udio are trying to conceal “the full scope of their infringement.” According to the complaint against Suno, the AI company did not deny that it used copyrighted materials in its training data when asked in prelitigation correspondence, but instead said that the training data is “confidential business information.”

"Our technology is transformative; it is designed to generate completely new outputs, not to memorize and regurgitate pre-existing content. That is why we don’t allow user prompts that reference specific artists," said Suno CEO Mikey Shulman in a statement. "We would have been happy to explain this to the corporate record labels that filed this lawsuit (and in fact, we tried to do so), but instead of entertaining a good faith discussion, they’ve reverted to their old lawyer-led playbook."

By Dhruv Mehrotra

By Paolo Armelli

By Simon Hill

By Angela Watercutter

Many leading generative AI companies are under intense scrutiny for how they train their tools. It’s common for these companies to argue that they are shielded by the “fair use” doctrine, which permits infringement in certain circumstances. It remains to be seen whether the court system will agree; major players like OpenAI are already facing a host of copyright infringement lawsuits from artists, writers, programmers, and other rights holders.

This isn’t the first time the music labels have entered the fray against AI companies. Universal Music Group filed a copyright lawsuit against Anthropic last year, alleging copyright infringement for training its chatbot Claude on artists’ lyrics without permission. But this new set of cases is notable because it addresses music as well as lyrics, which are often treated like other written text in the legal sphere.

This doesn’t mean that the labels are wholly opposed to AI. In fact, many are simultaneously working on projects with AI companies; UMG, for example, just announced a partnership with voice cloning startup SoundLabs. The issue here is what they consider to be the appropriation of intellectual property without a commercial return.

The music industry is still haunted by the specter of Napster, and the rise of AI-generated music introduces several possible competitive threats to their business models; right now, for example, nobody at a label sees royalties for an AI-generated song from Sudo or Udio, even if it resembles their work. “Synthetic musical outputs could saturate the market with machine-generated content that will directly compete with, cheapen, and ultimately drown out the genuine sound recordings on which the service is built,” the labels allege in their complaint.

The complaints underline a growing consensus in the music industry that licensing is the only proper way forward. “There is room for AI and human creators to forge a sustainable, complementary relationship,” the Suno complaint says. “This can and should be achieved through the well-established mechanism of free-market licensing that ensures proper respect for copyright owners.”

Update 6/24/24 2:28pm ET: This story has been updated with comment from Suno CEO Mikey Shulman.

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Openai sued by center for investigative reporting as media takes diverging paths on tech giant.

The lawsuit is at least the fifth from a news organization against the Sam Altman-led firm.

By Winston Cho

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OpenAI and Microsoft have been sued by another news organization for using articles to train its artificial intelligence systems, this time by the Center for Investigative Reporting.

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Time inks deal with openai as tech giant makes major publishing moves, toys 'r' us debuts first video ad using sora, openai's text-to-video tool.

The lawsuit is at least the fifth from a news organization against OpenAI over novel copyright issues associated with training its AI system. In recent months, similar complaints have been brought by The New York Times , Chicago Tribune and Denver Post . It expands a multifront legal battle that may have far-reaching implications on the news publishing industry, with the financial viability of media in a landscape in which readers can bypass direct sources in favor of search results generated by AI tools at stake.

Amid financial strife in the media industry, some news publishers have chosen to cut licensing deals with the tech giant. In May, OpenAI inked a deal with News Corp. that will bring content from its stable of media outlets to ChatGPT and other products from the company. Under the partnership, OpenAI has permission to display content from News Corp. mastheads in response to user questions. The agreement came amid a flurry of other deals last month with People owner Dotdash Meredith and Reddit.

Unlike other organizations that license material, CIR chief executive Monika Bauerlein said OpenAI and Microsoft “started vacuuming up our stories to make their product more powerful” without permission or compensation. She added, “This free rider behavior is not only unfair, it is a violation of copyright.”

The complaint nods to other lawsuits brought by news organizations against OpenAI. When CIR attempted to obtain the same regurgitations detailed in a case initiated by the Daily News , it says it received a message stating, “I’m sorry, but I can’t generate the original ending for the article or any copyrighted content.” The lawsuit claims that OpenAI recently changed ChatGPT to reduce the frequency of outputs that copy material from publishers.

Still, ChatGPT and Copilot repeatedly provide “highly detailed abridgements of copyright-protected news articles” from CIR, according to the complaint.

“In some instances, the initial response will summarize the article in substantial detail,” the lawsuit states. “Further, when prompted by the user to provide more information about one or more aspects of that abridgement, ChatGPT or Copilot will provide additional details, often in the format of a bulleted list of main points.”

By rewriting articles and providing them to users, CIR argues that OpenAI and Microsoft harm the market for those pieces by reducing the incentives to go to the original source. This reduces subscription, licensing and advertising revenue, the lawsuit says, and allows the tech companies to monetize news publishers’ content at the expense of copyright owners.

The complaint brings several copyright infringement claims, which carry damages up to $150,000 per infringed work. It seeks a court order forcing OpenAI and Microsoft to remove copies of copyrighted content from its training data sets.

On Tuesday, OpenAI said it would delay the launch of voice features for its chatbot to conduct further safety testing. After it unveiled a demo of the tool last month, legal action was threatened by Scarlett Johansson, who said that the company copied her voice for one of its AI personas.

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Microsoft AI boss Mustafa Suleyman incorrectly believes that the moment you publish anything on the open web, it becomes “freeware” that anyone can freely copy and use.

When CNBC’s Andrew Ross Sorkin asked him whether “AI companies have effectively stolen the world’s IP,” he said:

I think that with respect to content that’s already on the open web, the social contract of that content since the ‘90s has been that it is fair use. Anyone can copy it, recreate with it, reproduce with it. That has been “freeware,” if you like, that’s been the understanding.

Microsoft is currently the target of multiple lawsuits alleging that it — and OpenAI — are stealing copyrighted online stories to train generative AI models, so it may not surprise you to hear a Microsoft exec defend it as perfectly legal. I just didn’t expect him to be so very publicly and obviously wrong!

• AI companies have all kinds of arguments against paying for copyrighted content
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• The scary truth about AI copyright is nobody knows what will happen next

I am not a lawyer, but even I can tell you that the moment you create a work , it’s automatically protected by copyright in the US. You don’t even need to apply for it, and you certainly don’t void your rights just by publishing it on the web. In fact, it’s so difficult to waive your rights that lawyers had to come up with special web licenses to help!

Fair use, meanwhile, is not granted by a “social contract” — it’s granted by a court. It’s a legal defense that allows some uses of copyrighted material once that court weighs what you’re copying, why, how much, and whether it’ll harm the copyright owner .

That certainly hasn’t kept many AI companies from claiming that training on copyrighted content is “fair use ,” but most haven’t been as brazen as Suleyman when talking about it.

Speaking of brazen, he’s got a choice quote about the purpose of humanity shortly after his “fair use” remark:

What are we, collectively, as an organism of humans, other than a knowledge and intellectual production engine?

Suleyman does seem to think there’s something to the robots.txt idea — that specifying which bots can’t scrape a particular website within a text file might keep people from taking its content. He says:

There’s a separate category where a website, or a publisher, or a news organization had explicitly said ‘do not scrape or crawl me for any other reason than indexing me so that other people can find this content.’ That’s a grey area, and I think it’s going to work its way through the courts.

But robots.txt is not a legal document. It, not fair use, is the social contract that’s been with us since the ‘90s — and yet some AI companies appear to be ignoring it , too. Microsoft partner OpenAI is reportedly among those ignoring it .

Disclosure: Vox Media, The Verge’s parent company, has a technology and content deal with OpenAI.

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How to get contributors assign copyright for copyright holder?

Let's say we have a company and we release our project under LGPL && GPLv3, as you know the only thing here is about contribution. People commit bug-fixes/features to the project, it's fine and we are GPL fans.

Basically company makes money by this project. So what about contributors ? I know they commit code and software get better and it is actual repay to them, But how we can get contributors assign copyright for copyright holder?

2 Answers 2

In general, when an open source projects receives contributions from others because implicitly the contributor in contributing with the same license as that of project. This is true for most open source licenses single or dual. In this situation whether copyright of incremental work lies with project owner or the external contributor, everyone still has access to code.

However, the real question is what if the project has two licenses one open source and commercial? This is a problem because if an external contributor submits a patch that patch is not automatically ok that same patch gets redistributed to your customer automatically.

However, there are many successful projects, such as QT and MySQL, which have been available as open source as well as for commercial purposes. Read this: http://www.dina.kvl.dk/~abraham/rants/license.html

For example, what MySQL does is that it has what is called Sun Contributing License. Read this, http://forge.mysql.com/wiki/ContributingFAQ which says,

Contributors are required to sign the Sun Contributor Agreement (SCA) when contributing code to Sun/MySQL

Sameway, QT also makes it clear that

Contributing Code Not Owned by the Contributor

Read this: http://qt-project.org/legal.html

Of course, there is a possibility that given this condition, some people may not contribute back. However, that's only fair. But both these projects goes at great depth why contributor still gets benefited by contributing back.

• +1. Assigning copyright is important if you want to offer commercial licenses. Otherwise it may not be necessary. –  MarkJ Commented Feb 25, 2012 at 10:45
• As additional info, you can also check hof the Free Software Foundation handles contributions to GCC ( gcc.gnu.org/contribute.html ), which also require assignment of copyright. –  Bart van Ingen Schenau Commented Dec 26, 2012 at 15:18

Make it a condition of the code being included in the project, ideally as part of the software license.

There are a number of software licenses that do this; for example, in the Mozilla Public License:

Each Contributor hereby grants You a world-wide, royalty-free, non-exclusive license: a.under intellectual property rights (other than patent or trademark) Licensable by such Contributor to use, reproduce, make available, modify, display, perform, distribute, and otherwise exploit its Contributions, either on an unmodified basis, with Modifications, or as part of a Larger Work; and b.under Patent Claims of such Contributor to make, use, sell, offer for sale, have made, import, and otherwise transfer either its Contributions or its Contributor Version.

The GPL, in particular, requires that all contributions made to a GPL project be licensed under the terms of the GPL. So you shouldn't have to do anything else, other than make it clear to the contributors that this is the arrangement.

If you believe that some contributors may insist on retaining some or all rights to their code, simply have them sign a statement that indicates they are assigning copyright to your company; specifically, that it is a work for hire. Make it a condition of them getting paid for the code. Note that, in most jurisdictions (at least in the United States), if they are employees, you should already own the code.

Disclaimer: I am not a lawyer. Treat this information accordingly.

• 1 Then have them sign away their rights to the code. Simple. –  Robert Harvey Commented Feb 24, 2012 at 0:41
• 1 I would do it on paper. Click-through agreements are not always enforceable, especially after-the-fact. –  Robert Harvey Commented Feb 24, 2012 at 0:46
• 1 If you want rights to the code, yes. –  Robert Harvey Commented Feb 24, 2012 at 0:53
• 1 I don't know; I'm not a lawyer. :) –  Robert Harvey Commented Feb 24, 2012 at 0:55
• 1 Informative answer but the question is "how we can get contributors assign copyright". MPL requires contributors to grant a licence but not to assign copyright. Of course this may not matter, it depends what the OP wants to do. E.g. if they want to offer dual licences. –  MarkJ Commented Feb 25, 2012 at 10:43

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Orlando Cepeda dies

News nonprofit sues ChatGPT maker OpenAI and Microsoft for ‘exploitative’ copyright infringement

Copies of Mother Jones are shown in a photo taken on Wednesday, June 26, 2024, in Providence, R.I. The Center for Investigative Reporting, the publisher of Reveal and Mother Jones, said Thursday, June 27, 2024, it is suing ChatGPT maker OpenAI and its closest business partner, Microsoft, marking a new front in the legal battle between news publications fighting against unauthorized use of their content on artificial intelligence platforms. (AP Photo/Matt O’Brien)

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LOS ANGELES (AP) — The Center for Investigative Reporting said Thursday it has sued ChatGPT maker OpenAI and its closest business partner, Microsoft, marking a new front in the news industry’s fight against unauthorized use of its content on artificial intelligence platforms.

The nonprofit, which produces Mother Jones and Reveal , said that OpenAI used its content without permission and without offering compensation, violating copyrights on the organization’s journalism. The lawsuit, filed in a New York federal court, describes OpenAI’s business as “built on the exploitation of copyrighted works” and focuses on how AI-generated summaries of articles threaten publishers.

“It’s immensely dangerous,” Monika Bauerlein, the nonprofit’s CEO, told The Associated Press. “Our existence relies on users finding our work valuable and deciding to support it.”

Bauerlein said that “when people can no longer develop that relationship with our work, when they no longer encounter Mother Jones or Reveal, then their relationship is with the AI tool.”

That, she said, could “cut the entire foundation of our existence as an independent newsroom out from under us” while also threatening the future of other news organizations.

The lawsuit is the latest against OpenAI and Microsoft to land at Manhattan’s federal court, where the companies are already battling a series of other copyright lawsuits from The New York Times , other media outlets and bestselling authors such as John Grisham, Jodi Picoult and George R.R. Martin. The companies also face a separate case in San Francisco’s federal court brought by authors including comedian Sarah Silverman.

Some news organizations have chosen to collaborate rather than fight with OpenAI by signing deals to get compensated for sharing news content that can be used to train its AI systems. The latest to do so is Time, which announced Thursday that OpenAI will get access to its “extensive archives from the last 101 years.”

OpenAI didn’t respond directly to the lawsuit Thursday but said in a statement that it is “working collaboratively with the news industry and partnering with global news publishers to display their content in our products like ChatGPT, including summaries, quotes, and attribution, to drive traffic back to the original articles.” Microsoft didn’t respond to a request for comment.

OpenAI and other major AI developers don’t typically disclose their data sources but have argued that taking troves of publicly accessible online text, images and other media to train their AI systems is protected by the “fair use” doctrine of American copyright law. CIR’s lawsuit says a dataset that OpenAI has acknowledged using to build an earlier version of its chatbot technology contained thousands of links to the website of Mother Jones, a 48-year-old print magazine that’s been publishing online since 1993. But the text used for AI training was usually missing information about a story’s author, title or copyright notice.

Last summer, more than 4,000 writers signed a letter to the CEOs of OpenAI and other tech companies accusing them of exploitative practices in building chatbots.

“It’s not a free resource for these AI companies to ingest and make money on,” Bauerlein said of news media. “They pay for office space, they pay for electricity, they pay salaries for their workers. Why would the content that they ingest be the only thing that they don’t (pay for)?”

The AP is among the news organizations that have made licensing deals over the past year with OpenAI; others include The Wall Street Journal and New York Post publisher News Corp., The Atlantic, Axel Springer in Germany and Prisa Media in Spain, France’s Le Monde newspaper and the London-based Financial Times.

Mother Jones and CIR were both founded in the 1970s and merged earlier this year. Both are based in San Francisco, as is OpenAI.

The lawsuit from CIR, also known for its Reveal podcast and radio show, outlines the expense of producing investigative journalism and warns that losing control of copyrighted content will result in less revenue and even fewer reporters to tell important stories in “today’s paltry media landscape.”

“With fewer investigative news stories told, the cost to democracy will be enormous,” the lawsuit says.

O’Brien reported from Providence, Rhode Island.

The Associated Press and OpenAI have a licensing and technology agreement that allows OpenAI access to part of AP’s text archives.

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When folks send me pull-requests on GitHub, what are their copyright/licensing terms by default?

Say I'm maintaining a GPLv3 project on GitHub with a LICENSE file, code headers and all. Now, a few folks made some code enhancements and sent me a pull-request. Does that automatically mean that they agree to contribute under GPLv3 terms, or, do I have to do make some kind of separate agreement with each contributor? The latter is not only cumbersome, but practically impossible as projects become large. What is the usual practice in this regard for projects like WordPress, Drupal, Debian, Linux kernel, etc.? Do they all make formal agreements with the devs?

I had a look at this recently posted question which explored this same area, but didn't answer this exact question I have.

Most importantly, if today I accept someone's pull-request, can they come back five years down the line saying, "Hey, I didn't intend this to be GPLed all those years ago, so I want to assert my rights now."?

• contributor-agreements
• pull-request

• 2 Great question! The Apache license has a clause saying contributions have to be under apache as well, but not so sure about the GPL. I would assume that since the pull request would have the original license file, the fork would be under that license too. Regardless, there contributions would have to be under the GPL as well, as it could be viewed that it was distributed publicly on GitHub. Mind you, most large projects will have things known as contributor agreements, that need to be signed for this kind of issue. Either they license, or assign copyright to the original devs. –  Zizouz212 Commented Mar 6, 2016 at 21:46
• 2 I just found that Gihub has recently started a default CLA (Contributor License Agreement) for each PR that is submitted. This includes a patent grant and a irrevocable copyright license to reproduce to both project maintainers and Github! Here is relevant discussion link. But you are right, Apache's way is even better as it sets the CLA terms explicitly in the main license itself. I hope there is something similar for GPL too. –  Prahlad Yeri Commented Mar 6, 2016 at 22:00
• As per this comment, A GNU contributor is required to sign an actual dead-tree paper and send it by snail mail. In light of that, the GitHub CLA process is quite smooth. . I hope that is an exaggeration! –  Prahlad Yeri Commented Mar 6, 2016 at 22:06
• @PrahladYeri, that is for people who want to contribute to the FSF owned projects, where the FSF wants to retain all copyrights. To ask for the copyright is quite different than what OP is asking about. –  vonbrand Commented Mar 7, 2016 at 1:42
• @vonbrand, Indeed. Similarly, it also seems that the Github CLA I mentioned in the earlier comment applies to Github's own enterprise projects, not just all projects on Github. But someone needs to confirm that. –  Prahlad Yeri Commented Mar 8, 2016 at 15:41

3 Answers 3

Some GPL projects require explicit copyright assignment, not merely licensing, of contributions. Copyright assignment is a bigger deal that licensing, and perhaps can't be arranged by an Apache style 'if you contribute it you are X'ing it' clause, where Apache fills in 'license' for X and a hypothetical alternative fills in 'assign'.

According to the Why Assign page at gnu.org, the reason is that it permits the project owner/master/community to actually take legal action against violations of the license. Only the copyright holder can do that.

Keep in mind that when someone makes a derived work (a patch), they are required under the GPL to license it under ... the GPL. So as far as straight licensing is concerned, you're fine.

• I don't think it requires copyright assignment - but you're argument for cases of infringement are probably universal for all licenses. –  Zizouz212 Commented Mar 7, 2016 at 1:19
• This is the FSF, who wants to retain all copyright on the GNU project pieces. Many GPL projects don't do this (e.g. the Linux kernel doesn't). Others (e.g Ubuntu) ask to assign rights or a wide license to the project's owner under the name of Contributor License Agreement CLA . This is something completely separate from contributions as such. –  vonbrand Commented Mar 7, 2016 at 1:57
• 1 I find your first paragraph misleading. The Apache style does not 'assign' - you seem to imply that by contributing work to an Apache licensed project, that the copyright is then transferred to the maintainer/owner/project. That clause simply states that any contributions to the project shall be licensed under the same license. –  Zizouz212 Commented Mar 8, 2016 at 23:29

Update, based on new Terms of Service:

If a GitHub repository specifies a license, that's the default license for contributions.

Here's Section D.6 from GitHub's current Terms of Service :

6. Contributions Under Repository License Whenever you make a contribution to a repository containing notice of a license, you license your contribution under the same terms, and you agree that you have the right to license your contribution under those terms. If you have a separate agreement to license your contributions under different terms, such as a contributor license agreement, that agreement will supersede. Isn't this just how it works already? Yep. This is widely accepted as the norm in the open-source community; it's commonly referred to by the shorthand "inbound=outbound". We're just making it explicit.

This rule has been in effect since GitHub revised its Terms of Service on February 28, 2017 .

In case of doubt, you should state clearly that you only accept contributions under GPLv3 (or whatever license you select), and that the constributor must make sure they are allowed to contribute under the given terms. If it is redundant, it does no harm; if required, you need it to avoid getting into hot water. For a detailed example see e.g. the Linux document Documentation/SubmittingPatches . Probably any large software project has something similar.

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OpenAI, Microsoft sued by news nonprofit for copyright infringement

Lawsuit by the Center for Investigative Reporting comes after similar claims by The New York Times and other newspapers.

OpenAI and its main backer Microsoft are being sued by a news non-profit in the United States for alleged copyright infringement, the latest in a series of legal cases taken by news organisations against the tech giants.

The Center for Investigative Reporting (CIR), which publishes Mother Jones and Reveal, said on Thursday that it had filed the lawsuit accusing the tech firms of using its content without permission in a “rebuke to artificial intelligence and its exploitative practices”.

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“OpenAI and Microsoft started vacuuming up our stories to make their product more powerful, but they never asked for permission or offered compensation, unlike other organisations that license our material,” Monika Bauerlein, CEO of the Center for Investigative Reporting, said in a statement.

“This free rider behaviour is not only unfair, it is a violation of copyright. The work of journalists, at CIR and everywhere, is valuable, and OpenAI and Microsoft know it.”

OpenAI and Microsoft did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

The lawsuit, filed in federal court in New York, seeks damages and a court order forcing OpenAI and Microsoft to delete copyrighted material from their training data sets.

OpenAI’s ChatGPT chatbot relies on vast quantities of information scraped from the internet, including news sites, to respond to users’ queries.

The latest lawsuit, filed in federal court in New York, comes after similar claims filed against the companies by news outlets including The New York Times, The Intercept, New York Daily News, the Chicago Tribune and the Denver Post.

Well-known authors, including Jonathan Franzen, John Grisham and George RR Martin, have also sued OpenAI for allegedly using their work without permission or compensation.

While the arrival of ChatGPT has prompted blowback from the news industry, some outlets, such as The Financial Times, News Corp, Politico and Le Monde, have signed deals with OpenAI to share content and collaborate on artificial intelligence (AI) development.

On Thursday, TIME became the latest news organisation to partner with the ChatGPT maker, announcing a multi-year deal to provide access to its century of archives.

“Throughout our 101-year history, TIME has embraced innovation to ensure that the delivery of our trusted journalism evolves alongside technology,” TIME CEO Mark Howard said in a statement.

“This partnership with OpenAI advances our mission to expand access to trusted information globally as we continue to embrace innovative new ways of bringing TIME’s journalism to audiences globally.”