Comparative analysis of copyright assignment and licence formalities for Open Source Contributor Agreements

Citation: Andres Guadamuz, Andew Rens (2013) Comparative analysis of copyright assignment and licence formalities for Open Source Contributor Agreements. SCRIPTed (RSS)
DOI (original publisher): 10.2966/scrip.100213.207
Semantic Scholar (metadata): 10.2966/scrip.100213.207
Sci-Hub (fulltext): 10.2966/scrip.100213.207
Internet Archive Scholar (search for fulltext): Comparative analysis of copyright assignment and licence formalities for Open Source Contributor Agreements
Download: http://script-ed.org/?p=1065
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Summary

Overview of contributor agreements. Survey of relevant law in many jurisdictions.

"All of the jurisdictions surveyed allowed both exclusive and non-exclusive licensing of copyright, so it can be easily argued that this is the best solution for contributor agreements. Moreover, while the number of jurisdictions that require formalities for exclusive licenses remains high, the fact that some jurisdictions do not require formalities for such licenses also makes exclusive licensing a more logical choice. Assignment is however sometimes necessary for enforcement, so developers should consider whether the transaction costs of assignment (and its impossibility in several jurisdictions) do not weigh against obtaining the ability to enforce copyright on a contribution until litigation is actually contemplated."

"We found that all jurisdictions surveyed allowed contracts to be concluded by electronic means by allowing electronic signatures, and by having broad definitions for written requirements."

Theoretical and Practical Relevance

"Finally, there are some forms of contributor agreements that use neither assignment nor exclusive/non-exclusive licences. These are projects that simply require of contributors that they should licence their own code using a specific license. The most prominent example of this approach can be found in the Mozilla Foundation’s Committer Agreement,[13] which specifies that all code committed by the user should be made available under the terms of the Mozilla Public License.[14] Because this is a broad and open development license, this elegant approach mostly bypasses all questions about contract formation and formalities that can be asked with regards to CAAs and CLAs, as the project will simply use the code under the terms of the suggested licence in which the contributor allows the users to “use, reproduce, make available, modify, display, perform, distribute, and otherwise exploit”[15] the contributed code."