[consulting] copyright policies

[Kevin Amerson]

On Jan 25, 2008 11:59 AM, Laura Scott <laura at pingv.com> wrote:

> On Jan 25, 2008, at 1:43 AM, Ric Shreves wrote:
>
> > Just a quick bit of insight: I used to practice law (ironically, given
> > the current discussion, IP law!) and one of the complaints we always
> > heard was why we, as lawyers, charged everyone the full price every
> > single time we used what was essentially a boilerplate (template)
> > document. No one in that field blinks an eye at re-using those
> > documents to do the job. The view in that field is that the client is
> > paying for their experience, their advice & counsel, and the execution
> > of a task which the client is either unwilling or unable to do for
> > themselves.
>
> This actually raises a perfect analogy, I feel: You hire a lawyer to
> get you out of a traffic ticket. The lawyer does some nifty legal
> work and gets you off. Now you claim that the lawyer cannot do the
> same thing for anybody else -- that you now "own" that defense.
> Sounds silly in this context, doesn't it?


Yes this is true if you're writing code and releasing it to the public, and
making it publicly available then its basically the same, I could hire a
lawyer to fill out the document, or i could download it and fill it out
myself.  I could hire a developer to modify this code or I could download it
and do it myself.

After the document has been customized by the lawyer for me, its mine.  It
has my name on it, and verbatim, that lawyer is not going to give that
document to another client, they will start over with the boilerplate
template.  What I've heard people say on this list is that they will take
the modified document and start there, but with another client.  They aren't
going back to the downloadable version, the boilerplate template.  That's a
small but important distinction.  I'm not sure if this is ok or not, but it
sounds a little shady.


>
>
> Or, to take it to a further extreme, you hire a lawyer to write up a
> contract for you. Then you claim you own the words in the contract
> and the lawyer cannot use those words in any other contract. The
> lawyer will just laugh.
>

Yeah but we're not saying the words, we're saying the contract as a whole
that has been written specifically for you.  Can the lawyer take that
contract, as a whole, verbatim, and hand it to another client?  I think the
lawyer will start over with the template, but idk.  That gets into more of
the trickier parts of the law and is probably why IP lawyers exist, that's a
tough question to answer.

Specifically in reference to Drupal, Drupal is like the boilerplate
document, you can download it and customize it for someone at a price, when
you start working for someone else, then it makes sense to me that you would
download Drupal again and start over for the second person, customizing it
for them.  If you can convince them to release the additions under the GPL
(or if the new GPL addresses the distribution loophole and forces this) then
you can contribute that back to the community, upload the module and now the
module itself can be treated like a boilerplate template.  Download that,
modify, and move on.

The part that gets really hairy is when someone says that in addition to the
GPL (the GPL is always involved since we're talking about Drupal) that all
the code will be licensed back to them personally for reuse.  I'm not sure
if that's even possible, or what that even means.  That's like the lawyer
saying, yeah although this document now has your name on it, and your
specific information, I can take it verbatim (photocopy it) and distribute
it to others or otherwise use it for someone else.

Kevin
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