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Comment by btilly | Hacker News Reader

Nobody is discussing the reason for the copyright-assignment requirement. I only know about it because I was caught in the issue that it means to prevent nearly 20 years ago.

The issue is that in many places (for example New York State), work done by a professional employee actually belongs to your employer. A developer can write code, contribute it where they want, and license it as they wish. But the code is actually owned by their employer. Which means that if there is a future problem, the employer can assert their copyright interest and people who thought that they had the right to use that code, suddenly don't.

Because developers themselves are seldom aware of such rules, the FSF took the ultra-safe approach of requiring employers to sign off. That way they are absolutely sure that there will never be a problem.

However other open source projects have found that, in practice, problems are rare. And when there is a problem, the employers usually will agree to the license.

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AFAIK (one of the) the main reason for the copyright requirements is so that the GNU project can update the license, when a new version of the GPL is released, fixing loopholes or other issues in older versions. I am weary of dropping the copyright assignment, because issues like Tivoization could always pop up without anyone anticipating it, and even have contributors actively resisting the updates to fix these issues.

(Edit: What I also came to think of is that GCC recently positioned itself in opposition to the FSF because of the "Stallman-Controversy". Is this a kind of retaliation on their part?)

Copyright assignment is about enforceability, not updating the license. It's much easier to maintain copyright registrations, and to prosecute an infringement case, when you control all the copyrights.

Anyhow, we don't have to guess why they want it:

> Under US copyright law, which is the law under which most free software programs have historically been first published, there are very substantial procedural advantages to registration of copyright. And despite the broad right of distribution conveyed by the GPL, enforcement of copyright is generally not possible for distributors: only the copyright holder or someone having assignment of the copyright can enforce the license. If there are multiple authors of a copyrighted work, successful enforcement depends on having the cooperation of all authors.

> In order to make sure that all of our copyrights can meet the recordkeeping and other requirements of registration, and in order to be able to enforce the GPL most effectively, FSF requires that each author of code incorporated in FSF projects provide a copyright assignment, and, where appropriate, a disclaimer of any work-for-hire ownership claims by the programmer's employer. That way we can be sure that all the code in FSF projects is free code, whose freedom we can most effectively protect, and therefore on which other developers can completely rely.

https://www.gnu.org/licenses/why-assign.en.html

Yes, it is probably primarily about enforceability, but why should that mean that updating the license is also part of the consideration?

There could be all kinds of secondary motivations, including that ability. But most GPL'd software includes the "or later" provision, which means it's relatively easy for the FSF to update the license of projects, especially if they stipulate that contributions must be licensed thusly. Note that with or without assignment, the FSF could never rescind the license on previously released software, except perhaps for infringers (because of the termination clause). So assignment doesn't actually provide much value on that score except as it relates to enforcement.

Can't you enforce a license too? A license is a contract and if code is released in breach of that license than should be enforceable as well. Is the issue that a license breach is a legally weaker case than copyright infringement?

A license is not (necessarily) a contract, so a license breach is (mainly) enforceable precisely because it _is_ a copyright violation.

> Under US copyright law, which is the law under which most free software programs have historically been first published,

They are published with a worldwide public licence; I'm not even sure how one can publish something such as that under any specific law.

One drafts a public licence, and different parts of it are enforceable to different degrees in different jurisdictions.

It is of course quite possible for the licence to be gnostic of the country of the acceptee, and apply differing provisions in different cases, but I would feel such would strongly go against F.S.F. philosophies.

I figured that's why the GPL includes the language that says "GPL {x} or at your option a later version". That way, if you want to go to GPL {x+1}, the license already allows it.

Yup. But, remember, that's only if the original licensor actually executes that option, by explicitly stating so. If they says[1] "...under GPL version X", period, then that's it.

___

[1]: Hey, it's "the _singular_ 'they'", innit?

The GPL already includes a clause stating "or any later version" so GNU software can happily update the GPL version. Linux specifically has an exception to this. It is the dodgiest part of the whole GPL in my opinion and gives the Free Software Foundation a lot of power and makes it impossible to fork or replace the established organisation if it goes awry.

Doesn't this work out a bit like MongoDB, where Amazon forked a version released before they replaced the GPL with their own license? Meaning the freedoms of the GPL will be withheld, no?

Yes it's very similar, the scope is just vastly different. If you have the "or later" GPL clause in your license then any new version of the GPL is retroactively a valid licensing option for your code, even if it's vastly different or actually removes freedoms. If they wanted the FSF could release GPLv4 tomorrow that just says all code licensed under it is public domain, and instantly all code with the "or later" clause could be treated as public domain.

Thanks for the clarification.

But if you don’t own the copyright to a particular piece of the code, doesn’t that also mean you don’t have the authority to assign a license to it?

The GPL gives you a licence to the code, you don't need to own the copyright.

The problem appears to come when someone doesn't have the right to license it under (any) GPL in the first place because their employer owns all code they write.

Yes, but I can’t put GPL on someone else code. Whoever owns the code has to do it. And when I write code for hire, I have no right to the code, the legal person who hired me does.

So, how would I put a GPL license on code that I wrote for somebody else without their permission?

When writing GPL'ed code for your employer your employer must obviously be (made) aware that that code is going to be licensed under the GPL. Therefore, as the copyright holder -- they have already given permission for that license to be used or they must do so.

Seems pretty straightforward to me.

Nope, sorry, it's not that straightforward at all: Under American labour laws (in many, but perhaps not all jurisdictions), your employer owns the copyright to whatever you write even on your own time. So they might not even have known, at the time, that you were writing something in the first place. But if you do so and release it without notifying them, and they later find out you wrote it while in their employ, they might claim that "Hey, that's _ours,_ and we sure never authorised releasing that under <<whatever>> license!"

I think you might be missing context for the thread? Or maybe I'm inferring context that isn't there.

I thought we were discussing the "no copyright assignment" scenario.

> But if you do so and release it without notifying them

That's them not doing due diligence as far as I can tell. The employee would also be in breach of contract, possibly even committing a crime.

Employees can do all sort of illegal acts while in the employ of someone else... and when that happens you prosecute them (if it's egregious enough).

I suppose it may mean that an upstream project may be harmed quite badly if this goes on for long enough...

... but that's no different for any open source project. Or even closed source: Maybe an employee is working for two companies and 'reusing' code in an unauthorized way.

> I think you might be missing context for the thread? Or maybe I'm inferring context that isn't there.

I don't think I was, and I think you were.

> I thought we were discussing the "no copyright assignment" scenario.

Yup, exactly. Not that it makes much of a difference: To release something under any license, even without assigning any copyright, you need to have the copyright. (Or similar rights granted by a license, but in the end those too have to stem from someone actually having the right to license the thing they're licensing -- i.e. copyright.)

> > But if you do so and release it without notifying them

> That's them not doing due diligence as far as I can tell.

Not if you wrote and released it after you were already employed, now is it?

> The employee would also be in breach of contract, possibly even committing a crime.

Yes, exactly. Are you saying that can never happen, or what? That's exactly what I was pointing out.

> Employees can do all sort of illegal acts while in the employ of someone else... and when that happens you prosecute them (if it's egregious enough).

Sure. But if you're a FOSS project that they've contributed code to, with or without copyright assignment, that doesn't help you. You've still got to rip it out.

Sigh... I must have been unclear in my GP comment. So I'll go back to your GGP and try another tack:

> > > When writing GPL'ed code for your employer your employer must obviously be (made) aware that that code is going to be licensed under the GPL. Therefore, as the copyright holder -- they have already given permission for that license to be used or they must do so.

But if you write code and release it under the GPL there's nothing to say that you necessarily are doing it "for your employer". People could well assume that since they wrote something on their own machine and their own time, it has nothing to do with their job -- and then be in for a nasty surprise when their employer has a different opinion on that. The employer may well have had no idea at the time that someone was writing and releasing code, so they have neither already given permission for it to be licensed thus, nor do they have to.

Confusion abounds :D

> Sure. But if you're a FOSS project that they've contributed code to, with or without copyright assignment, that doesn't help you. You've still got to rip it out.

That was kind of my point, at least. Anyone can fake a copyright assignment form if they really want to, so we're not better off asking for it?

> That was kind of my point, at least. Anyone can fake a copyright assignment form if they really want to, so we're not better off asking for it?

Dunno fersure, but probably yes, after all: If you're the project and have a signed statement, at least that shows that you're not just blithely grabbing whatever you can but are actually doing your best (WTF else could you do?[1]) to ascertain that you are in the clear. If the statement the contributor signed is false, that's on them, not you.

___

[1]: What you could do is perhaps have the statement include an explicit bit about "I don't have an employment contract that assigns this copyright to any employer / I have permission from my employer to sign away this copyright on their behalf; see attachment 2B". Dunno if these assignment docs already have that. If not, perhaps they should.

> I can’t put GPL on someone else code. Whoever owns the code has to do it.

Perhaps a nitpick, but this doesn't seem to take account of derivative works like forks. If Alice releases libalice under a permissive licence, Bob can develop a fork of libalice and release that fork under the GPL.

The original author contributes the code under "or any later version". So the project maintainer (or anyone) can then use a newer version of the GPL if they want (but not some other unrelated version).

> The original author contributes the code under "or any later version".

That’s the part I’m stuck on. How would I do that on code I do not own, because I wrote it for hire?

I’m guessing there a legal answer to this question somehow, it has to have come up at some point.

You don't own the copyright so you can't license it under any licenses. So your original contribution was unlicensed and therefore the owner of the copyright can declare all use by anyone as infringement on their IPRs.

> That’s the part I’m stuck on. How would I do that on code I do not own, because I wrote it for hire?

Well anyone can write a letter that says "I hereby grant you a license to use this code under these terms...", but if they don't hold the copyright on it then the letter is meaningless (or maybe fraudulent). So in court you would have to prove that that person's copyright is actually valid, and if the code was written by someone who was employed and their employer didn't sign a disclaimer of work-for-hire ownership claims, then that could be disputed.

If you want to enforce the copyright against other people, as the FSF did, then that's bad. If you just want to avoid getting sued yourself, then it's probably not really a problem, because the employer would have to positively prove that they held the copyright to be able to enforce it. That said, some projects that don't require copyright assignment do still require a disclaimer of work-for-hire claims in their CLA.

Actually, the GPL itself does not contain that clause. The FSF encourages you to release software as "GPL 3 or later", but if you don't explicitly state that (by using their recommended license notice, or otherwise) then your work is only licensed under that exact version of the GPL.

One noteworthy case is that Linus did not release the kernel as "GPL 2 or later" and as such it is still GPL 2, and incompatible with GPL 3 licensed code.

Of course (almost?) all GNU and FSF projects, like GCC, include the "or later" clause.

This is a classic case of somewhat-unintended consequences. When the GPL was first published, authors assumed developers would actually read it, and provided the recommended notice as a customizable template. Instead, developers just blindly copypasted, because "who's got time to read, amirite?". And then somebody actually woke up to the "or later" clause when the tivoization debate happened, and started accusing this and that of nefarious intent.

> What I also came to think of is that GCC recently positioned itself in opposition to the FSF because of the "Stallman-Controversy". Is this a kind of retaliation on their part?

"Random acts of rms" aren't a new problem for the GCC developers, and resulted in the egcs split, have caused ongoing pain with people trying to improve the ability of GCC to integrate with IDEs, and of course there's the whole debacle where the Clang developers offered their work to the FSF but Stallman missed the email and found it a decade later...

However, several of the lead developers for C++ (at least) announced they were no longer going to be assigning their code ownership to the FSF in the wake of the recent FSF calls around rms, which has put the GCC project in the position where the have the choices to:

1. Hope the FSF change their mind and prioritise free software ahead of the Cult of Richard.

2. Commit to shipping a sub-par and increasingly irrelevant free software compiler.

3. Drop the CLA requirement.

In the absence of any change on the first point, the third option looks like the best way to ensure that there is still a high-quality, GPL complier available.

Apple and the LLVM developers were contributing to GCC, interacting with the GCC Community and in contact with the GCC Steering Committee. They knew that GCC was lead by the GCC Steering Committee, not RMS. The fact that they supposedly sent one email to RMS, did not follow up with RMS, and did not try to contact any other leadership in the GCC Project is convenient.

> The fact that they supposedly sent one email to RMS

Stallman himself has confirmed that they did. Where does this "supposedly" come from?

Chris sent a message to RMS and RMS dropped the ball. There were other conversations with Chris and Chris dropped the ball as well.

You're getting it wrong. He sent mail to the GCC mailing list.

And even if he had sent it to RMS, how would the failure be described as Lattner's choice to "not follow up with RMS"? How could it be accurately described as anything other than the opposite: RMS not following up with Lattner?

s/weary/wary

> (Edit: What I also came to think of is that GCC recently positioned itself in opposition to the FSF because of the "Stallman-Controversy". Is this a kind of retaliation on their part?)

More like a necessity to keep the project alive. Half of the top contributors threatened to leave when FSF tried to coup the steering committee.

> More like a necessity to keep the project alive. Half of the top contributors threatened to leave when FSF tried to coup the steering committee.

(Replied to you in another place as well) what is the source for “coup the steering committee”?

Many that contribute due not want such an update to the work they own without reviewing the new licence to see if they agree.

Another solution which other projects use is a requirement that it be licensed to that project, and that project alone as permissive, which has no greater risk than assigning copyright to that project, the project can now relicense the code as it sees fit, but one continue to owns once work and one is free to license it to others how one sees fit, including not at all.

GCC has been split once (remember EGCS?), then merged back. It did not really hurt the project much, AFAICT.

There can be another split.

People might argue that it's a stretch (and there'd be some rationale to the argument, although it's ultimately wrong), but LLVM would be aptly considered a split, and it's a split that has had a huge impact.

Lattner begins working on LLVM, a code generator. He and his advisor publish a paper "Architecture for a Next-Generation GCC" <https://llvm.org/pubs/2003-05-01-GCCSummit2003.html>. When he considers this work sufficiently mature, Lattner attempts to donate it to the FSF and get it into mainline GCC, but he gets rebuffed. Apple, who has taken an interest and is his employer by that point, really wants LLVM to be a thing, though, so two years later, they announce Clang and eventually turn out an entire compiler toolchain. It transforms from the original LLVM per se into what people mean when they say "LLVM" today: the work at llvm.org—which, again, all started from what was expected to be a replacement for GCC's code generator.

I'm not sure I understand this idea. Whether you assign the rights to FSF or not, the situation is not different. (For the project) If the employer owns the rights, the copyright assignment is illegal and void - the employee never had the right to do it. It's a bigger hassle for the employee who lied, but gcc would be in the same situation.

"That way they are absolutely sure that there will never be a problem." just doesn't seem correct in that case.

> If the employer owns the rights, the copyright assignment is illegal and void - the employee never had the right to do it

Is that actually true though?

Suppose Alice has a full-time job with HyperSuperMegaSoft. Alice writes a patch to IndependentSoftwareFoundation's FooBolCompiler. When Alice submits the patch to IndependentSoftwareFoundation, she warrants to IndependentSoftwareFoundation that she has the right to do so. Years later, HyperSuperMegaSoft decides to sue IndependentSoftwareFoundation for including Alice's patch in their FooBolCompiler, because they claim Alice never got proper internal approval (under HyperSuperMegaSoft's internal policies and procedures) to submit the patch. Is a court going to invalidate Alice's agreement with IndependentSoftwareFoundation because Alice didn't follow the right internal procedures with her employer? Or will the court decide that IndependentSoftwareFoundation shouldn't be punished for Alice's mistake, that HyperSuperMegaSoft is bound by Alice's actions as their employee even if they didn't approve of them, that IndependentSoftwareFoundation has the right to use the software under the agreement, and that HyperSuperMegaSoft can't successfully sue IndependentSoftwareFoundation (or FooBolCompiler's end-users)–they may still be able to successfully sue Alice for violating her employment contract (although that probably is far less an attractive proposition to HyperSuperMegaSoft than suing IndependentSoftwareFoundation is.)

IANAL so I don't know what the right answer is. (The right answer probably depends on the jurisdiction.) But I get the impression some people assume that HyperSuperMegaSoft would automatically win against IndependentSoftwareFoundation, possibly without having good justification for that assumption.

> invalidate Alice's agreement with IndependentSoftwareFoundation because Alice didn't follow the right internal procedures with her employer?

Internal procedures are not the law. The contacts are. If the contract says her software belongs to the company, then it does. (Unless the country law says otherwise of course)

In the same way I can't legally sell you a copy of Windows license that I totally promise I've got an agreement with MS about. It's not a license I have rights to.

Suppose Alice has signed two contracts, one with her employer assigning them copyright in whatever she develops, and another with IndependentSoftwareFoundation assigning them copyright in something particular she develops. Why automatically assume the former contract legally trumps the later?

Also, employees can act as agents for their employers. Suppose Alice falsely warrants to IndependentSoftwareFoundation that she has her employer's approval to submit the code in question. If an employee makes an unauthorised agreement with IndependentSoftwareFoundation, I don't think a court will necessarily automatically invalidate that agreement just because the employee wasn't properly authorised. It depends on the circumstances.

It is like the case of the employee who buys an expensive dinner on the corporate credit card, and then the employer rejects the expense claim as violating policy. The employer can't refuse to pay the credit card company, or the restaurant, because the employee violated policy. The most the employer can do is fire the employee and sue them for damages. The employee entered into a contract with the restaurant on behalf of their employer, and the employer is bound by the contract even if the employee wasn't authorised to enter into it.

> In the same way I can't legally sell you a copy of Windows license that I totally promise I've got an agreement with MS about. It's not a license I have rights to.

Different situation in a couple of ways. Firstly, you didn't have anything to do with developing Windows. Suppose a Windows developer writes some code and puts it in Windows (under their Microsoft employee copyright assignment) then puts the same code in some open source project (under some other copyright assignment they sign without Microsoft's knowledge or consent). That's the scenario I'm talking about here which is rather different from the scenario you are talking about.

Secondly, Microsoft Windows is famous and if some random person (with no apparent association with Microsoft) tries to sell you a license to it you have good reason to suspect the license is invalid. Some random piece of code a developer writes isn't famous and so someone who receives it doesn't have the same grounds for suspecting it. Courts tend to have more sympathy for people who make reasonable good faith assumptions than for people who assume things that a reasonable person should know are unlikely to be true.

As I said, I'm not a lawyer and I'm not claiming any particular answer here is necessarily the right one. I think it likely depends on the jurisdiction and the specific details of each particular case. I just don't think it is as clearcut as some other people (including yourself) seem to think it is.

What the court decides with regards to damages and similar issues is a bit fuzzy of course.

But the original claim was "That way they are absolutely sure that there will never be a problem." - and for that one, it's obviously not true - it's going to be a problem in the situation I described. It may be a mistake with a good faith assumption, and there may be agreements because it's a trivial amount of code. But it's not going to be "haha, that person did a little bit of fraud, let's ignore it".

> What the court decides with regards to damages and similar issues is a bit fuzzy of course.

It isn't just fuzzy what the court will decide with regards to damages – I think it is also (at least sometimes) going to be fuzzy with respect to what the court will decide as to the substance of the dispute.

> But the original claim was "That way they are absolutely sure that there will never be a problem." - and for that one, it's obviously not true

You can never be absolutely sure there isn't going to be a problem. But you can't be sure there is going to be one either.

> But it's not going to be "haha, that person did a little bit of fraud, let's ignore it".

There isn't necessarily any fraud involved here. The employee may have a good faith (even if mistaken) belief that they are allowed to submit the code to the open source project. The open source project may have a good faith and reasonable belief that they are legally allowed to receive it. In that scenario, neither party is committing any fraud. And if the employer later decides they don't agree with what happened, there is no guarantee the employer will necessarily always win a case against the open source project.

> Suppose Alice has signed two contracts, one with her employer assigning them copyright in whatever she develops, and another with IndependentSoftwareFoundation assigning them copyright in something particular she develops. Why automatically assume the former contract legally trumps the later?

The legal system probably will (and I gotta admit it seems reasonable to me too), because she received consideration for the former contract.

You have to keep in mind that, legally speaking, consideration doesn't have to be monetary. Just because no money changed hands in her contract with IndependentSoftwareFoundation doesn't mean there was no consideration involved.

But there is no a priori assumption that there was any consideration, whereas with the employment contract there is quite obviously, as standard, quite significant remuneration.

So, sorry, but I think anyone will have a hard time arguing against "How could you think you had that left to give away to Party X, when you already took / are taking the money for selling it to Party Y?"

In common law systems, if there is a contract there is consideration. Without consideration (which doesn't necessarily have to be monetary), there cannot be a contract (although you could have some other form of legal agreement, such as a deed or promissory estoppel.)

So, when I presented a hypothetical involving two contradictory contracts, both contracts (presuming a common law legal system) necessarily have consideration, or else you are denying one of the premises of the hypothetical.

So what kind of contract for consideration did Alice sign with a free software project? Your hypothetical feels very hypothetical.

It isn't hypothetical at all. The FSF's standard copyright assignment contract includes consideration on both sides – the contributor's consideration is assignment of copyright, the FSF's consideration is a non-exclusive license to said copyright. It has to include consideration on both sides or else it wouldn't be a legally valid contract. (You can still have a legal agreement without any consideration, but then it has to be a deed not a contract; people often prefer contracts to deeds because in many jurisdictions deeds have more stringent formality requirements.)

Another possible consideration the project could offer Alice would be the intangible benefit of having her code included in the project. Those intangible benefits include the benefits to Alice's reputation (she can truthfully say "I wrote part of X"), and also the maintenance benefits of upstreaming code.

Legally, consideration doesn't have to monetary. It can be something intangible, such as a copyright license, reputational benefits, the maintenance benefits of upstreaming, etc. All that's really necessary for consideration to exist is each side has to give something to the other, but usually the legal standards for what counts as consideration are pretty low.

A) rather weird definition of "consideration". One would have thought this means something that can be accepted in lieu of what is given up, i.e. can at least somehow plausibly be claimed to be of equivalent value. But "a non-exclusive license to said copyright" is a strict sub-set of said copyright, so it can only ever be worth less. That's as much "consideration" as, say, "from now on you'll work for me sixteen hours out of every twenty-four. As consideration, I'll let you have the other eight off." Uh, I owned all of my time so far, and now you come out of the blue and want to make me your slave. How is you not suddenly taking a small part of my life "consideration" for taking most of it?

B)ut still: If she does that while already being employed, then she has already signed away those rights to her employer (in [most jurisdictions of] the USA). So she just simply no longer possesses those rights to sign away to any project, whether for consideration or not. Because as an employee, she almost certainly already got consideration (salary) for them. The monthly (or is it still weekly / biweekly over there?) paycheck is just such a humongously obvious proof and reminder of this.

The idea is that discovery of the true rightsholder is a natural byproduct of the copyright assignment process. With the formal process in place, it's much less susceptible to the risk of accidentally accepting code that exists as a work of corporate authorship than it would be if people just start sending in patches and you apply them.

By far the most important reason to require copyright assignment is to retain the ability to change the license at will.

You don't need copyright assignment for the case you mention: you can require that an officer of the employer make the contribution, or that the contribution be in the name of the employer.

IANAL but an employee generally does not have to just contribute work related code. The company has to OK it either for specific contributions or as a blanket policy, but it's opt in.

Then there is a secondary question on whether you contribute the code under a specific license (say Apache 2.0 GPL, etc.) or whether you assign the copyright.

In the former case the code can only be used in accordance with that specific license, in the latter case the code can be re-licensed by the copyright holder.

In either case the company could claim that the employee did not have the right to contribute the code, but (AFAIK) that is independent of a copyright grant vs license grant.

On a radiant note, I wonder what would happen if one used the Free Art License or Creative Commons ShareAlike for code? They're nice and simple licenses, and programming is an art.

Creative Commons explicitly warn against using Creative Commons licenses for software:

> We recommend against using Creative Commons licenses for software. Instead, we strongly encourage you to use one of the very good software licenses which are already available

> Unlike software-specific licenses, CC licenses do not contain specific terms about the distribution of source code, which is often important to ensuring the free reuse and modifiability of software. Many software licenses also address patent rights, which are important to software but may not be applicable to other copyrightable works. Additionally, our licenses are currently not compatible with the major software licenses, so it would be difficult to integrate CC-licensed work with other free software. Existing software licenses were designed specifically for use with software and offer a similar set of rights to the Creative Commons licenses.

https://creativecommons.org/faq/#can-i-apply-a-creative-comm...

It is worth mentioning, that people are unaware that often the code they create after work, in their own spare time is actually owned by their employer.

I think this should be illegal and if employer claims ownership of your time outside of working hours, they should be required to pay accordingly, perhaps with out of office extra rates.

Unfortunately there is not much a poor employee can do against a multi billion company that avoids tax and has more money to spend on lawyers than some smaller countries could...

A) Only (or at least, almost only) in America.

B) Not even everywhere in America, I think -- ISTR reading about how employment terms like that are illegal in some state(s?).

If you can go into it, what was the resolution of the issue in which you were caught?

This seems to be about assignments from the individuals though, not their employers.

The question is whether the stuff to be assigned (or not) belongs to the individuals or their employers. An assignment from someone who isn't actually entitled to assign away something (because they don't own it in the first place) is useless.

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