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Comment by willnorris | Hacker News Reader

Just to be clear on this, Google projects (including side projects of Google employees) do not require copyright assignment in the way that FSF projects to. They require an explicit copyright license, but the author retains the copyright. Full details at https://cla.developers.google.com/about

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Interesting, thanks for the correction.

Reading that page, it appears that this due to US IP ownership agreements for employees. Is that correct?

If so, why isn't there an exception for personal-time-only contributions by single developers, or at least those outside a jurisdiction like the US where an employer may own each and all of your ideas and intellectual output? To be clear, I haven't lived or worked in the US, so this is all foreign and weird to me.

US Copyright defaults to the author, it is only with employee contracts/agreements that one can forego the default and assign to the company. Something like the google license is there to help with making a clear distinction between google-owned copyright, author-owned copyright and author-owned copyright permanently licensed to google. Meaning that google will never be required to pay any kind of royalties for the author's work even after they leave employment at google.

> US Copyright defaults to the author, it is only with employee contracts/agreements that one can forego the default and assign to the company.

I'm pretty sure this is not true. In fact, it's the opposite of how it actually works. There's an explicit exception in the Copyright Act for a "work made for hire". If you're creating a opyrighted work for an employer, the employer is always the author of the work at the moment of inception.

http://www.copyright.gov/circs/circ09.pdf

I always line out those sections of employee agreements... Fortunately, haven't had a problem with it yet.

There are separate state laws, iirc such as California, which makes parts of those kinds of provisions void.

If you mean striking through some sections in contracts too, but wouldn't you have to do it in both copies to have some level of confidence? I cannot imagine you can do this with, say, an ISP contract where you don't agree with some clause.

In the past I've had contracts reprinted after pointing out errors in them.

If it's got my physical signature on it, I've blacked/crossed out the offending sections... recently, even an "online" contract had the option to blackout portions, which I thought was a pretty cool feature.

So, yes, if it's a copy with my signature, it has the offending pieces crossed out.

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