[consulting] copyright policies

[Katherine Lawrence]

For something to be patentable it needs to be not previously known, unique,
unobvious, and useful. It needs to pass the patent examiner who will look to
prior art to challenge the inventor's claim of those parameters. Also,
unless the individual assigns the rights to someone else, say as a condition
of employment, the patent belongs to the inventor, even if the firm the
inventor is working for is paying the inventor a salary. But these are moot
points with software that is open source.

 

From: Kevin Amerson [mailto:kevin.amerson at gmail.com] 
Sent: Friday, January 25, 2008 10:36 AM
To: katherine at pingv.com; A list for Drupal consultants and Drupal
service/hosting providers
Subject: Re: [consulting] copyright policies

 

Then a few things could happen:

1. The end product would be owned by Ford, and would be patentable
2. Or... the governing open source license and specifics would deem that the
product would have to be open source (currently depending on how its
distributed through a loophole in one of the available open source
liecenses) 

Either way, as a contracted developer, you don't own any of it.  Unless, of
course, you somehow convinced your client to sign something they shouldn't
have.

Kevin

On Jan 25, 2008 11:31 AM, Katherine Lawrence < katherine at pingv.com> wrote:

What if you used open source to build the assembly line so that Henry Ford
did not own any patents?

 

From: consulting-bounces at drupal.org [mailto:consulting-bounces at drupal.org]
On Behalf Of Kevin Amerson
Sent: Friday, January 25, 2008 10:19 AM
To: A list for Drupal consultants and Drupal service/hosting providers
Subject: Re: [consulting] copyright policies

 

 

Ex. If Henry Ford came to me asked me to build a factory to build his 
cars quickly. Then I used my skill to build an assembly line. Then the
Wright Brothers came to be and asked for me to build a factory for
their planes. I would build an assembly line.

I don't see any issue here because the tool was created by me and the 
overall product is different. If someone hires me to build a  new kind
of social networking site that has never been done before and I create
a super fast data access library while building that site, that tool
is mine and is my creative work. I would not re-create the social
networking idea that was the final product but I would re-use my code
on the next pizza site I built.


If you did this Henry Ford would sue you.  The reason being he owns the
patent on the assembly line, he owns all the machines and patents on all
those machines.   In fact this  is exactly what gave Ford an advantage for
so many years.  When you were working for Ford in this scenario, everything
you did, every idea you came up with belonged to him. 

This thread  is amazing to me.   I've been on both sides of the fence, and
you have  to come to the realization that if you're hired as a contractor to
build something for someone else, then they own it, if you're a full time
employee and you invent something cool while on the job for them, they own
it!!!  they own all of it. If they agree to license it under the GPL then it
should be made publicly available, but any client willing license part of
that back to the developer or the developer using any part of it for their
own personal gain through reselling it and charging more money for more
custom development of it is just crazy, and quite possibly illegal. 

I understand that many of you are competing with offshore companies, you
will do yourselves a favor to keep this in mind, that for a US based company
to drag an offshore company through litigation is quite expensive (so they
just won't do it), its much less expensive for a US based company to drag a
US based company through litigation. 

 


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