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Comment by Slartie | Hacker News Reader

I don't know the exact legal situation in the US, but let me assure you, the described legal copyright situation is very much possible, because German copyright works exactly like that.

I am a software developer, so I write software. I am employed full-time by an employer for which I (usually) write code, documentation and such, and still I own the copyright to each and every line of code or documentation or whatever I write. Simply because copyright in German law is non-transferrable. Even if I want to, I cannot sign over the copyright to anybody else, hence my employer couldn't make me sign it over to him in my employment contract. Instead, there's a clause that I grant my employer an exclusive and irrevocable right to use the work I create during my paid work time in any way he wants. This effectively leaves me with the copyright, but I don't have any rights to profit off of that work anymore, so that copyright isn't of much use to me.

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You have every right to profit according to German law. You have to be compensated appropriately for your employer to be allowed to use what you hold the copyright for. Usually this is ensured by your monthly salary. However, if what you did and hold the copyright for becomes a surprise success you have to be compensated appropriately in addition to your salary. In practical terms, if your code makes a billion bucks and you only get a regular average salary you could sue the employer and would probably win.

> In practical terms, if your code makes a billion bucks and you only get a regular average salary you could sue the employer and would probably win.

I very much doubt that. Software isn't something that exists in a vacuum and even if you are the sole author of a program, it might contain or be based on trade secrets of the company.

Even if that's not the case, software doesn't generate profit on its own - you still need to sell licences or services based around it. Both of which are equally contributing to any profit a program generates.

Since it's still the employer who bears the entrepreneurial risk, there's a solid argument to be made against winning such a case.

So close and yet so far. You need to read section 69b of the German copyright code (§69b UrhG) asap.

> copyright in German law is non-transferrable. > I grant my employer an exclusive and irrevocable right to use the work

I am curious, what rights have you retained with your work then? What are the corner cases where you might you still want exercise your copyright?

The way it works in slovenia and I imagine germany as well is that moral rights are nontransferrable. You always “own” your work. It’s the commercial copyright that you’re transferring.

In practical terms this means mostly boopkis.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moral_rights

There is at least authorship.

If you wrote code, the company isn't allowed to claim someone else did.

But remember that gets very murky when you are working in a team.

Is there any observable difference between copyright being reassigned from employee to company vs copyright remaining with the individual but the company getting automatic exclusive and irrevocable use of the copyright?

You have the right to be identified as the author of the work.

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