Work legalities

Darragh Bailey felix at compsoc.nuigalway.ie
Tue Dec 11 05:52:32 CST 2007


I was hoping to be able to submit some patches for wine over the
christmas holidays. So I'm trying to sort out with work any legalities
with regards to my employment contract and working on other projects.

Basically the contract states that they own what I do, unless I get
permission from the relevant managers internally to write code for
work outside of my employment.

In general there isn't any issues in work getting permission to work 
on open source projects, the company is involved in enough of them
itself. However I did remember reading some emails over a year ago on
this list about getting written permission, and examples of what would
be needed. Just have a query on part of the text.


On Thu, Mar 08, 2007 at 02:19:21PM -0600, Jeremy White wrote:
> I asked James Vasile, of the Software Freedom Law Center,
> to comment on this.  (For those who don't recall, the SFLC
> officially represents the Wine project on legal matters).
> 
> This is essentially what he had to say (and James, correct
> me if I get anything wrong :-/):
> 
> > If you are employed to do programming (even at a university), or have
> > made an agreement with your employer, school or anyone else saying it
> > owns software you write, then you and we need a signed document from
> > them disclaiming any rights they may have to the software.  The
> > disclaimer should be signed by a vice president, general manager, or
> > anyone else who is authorized to assign software owned by them.  Here
> > is a sample wording:
> >
> > As a general rule, get everything in writing.  The below will suffice.
> > Email is fine, paper is better.  The project needs a copy (or, better
> > yet, the original) of the document.
> >
> > Here's some sample text:
> >
> > ACME Corporation ("Company") hereby disclaims all copyright interest
> > in the code written by Jane Doe for the program "[insert name of
> > program]" ("Program"), including original Program code and
> > documentation and support files, changes and enhancements to the
> > Program and files, and any future modifications of the Program and
> > files.  We do not consider the code as work made for hire for us.
> > Company affirms that it has no other intellectual property interest
> > that would undermine this release, or the use of the Program, and will
> > do nothing to undermine it in the future.
> >
> > [signature of John Smith], 30 March 2006
> > John Smith, Vice President, ACME Corp.
> 
> 
> Ideally, you would obtain this in writing and then get this
> on to James (vasille - at - softwarefreedom - dot - org, or
> use snail mail/fax from their web site).
> 
> Cheers,
> 
> Jeremy
> 

These lines specifically may be an issue.

> > files.  We do not consider the code as work made for hire for us.
> > Company affirms that it has no other intellectual property interest
> > that would undermine this release, or the use of the Program, and
> > will do nothing to undermine it in the future.

My reading of this, is it would cover patents as well. So if the company 
(it's a big multi-national, really really big, but not microsoft :) ), 
has any patents covering wine, not just the code I write for wine, this 
would mean they release all rights to any patents possibly covering wine.

Now I just cannot see them being willing to perform a risk assessment on
all IP they might have in this case. Just to let one employee

I can see the possibility of getting sign off on them not claiming any
copyright over any code I write provided it doesn't use any company
resources (equipment or time), but not where it covers all IP. 


So, do I have the correct reading of what the statement means? 

Any suggestions on how to deal with this, without simply leaving the
company. As I mentioned early, they do work on open source code here
too, so I plan to discuss this with my manager as well.

-- 
Darragh

"Nothing is foolproof to a sufficiently talented fool."



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