Internationalisation of FOSS Contributory Copyright Assignments and Licenses: Jurisdiction-Specific or “Unported”?
Citation: Axel Metzger (2013) Internationalisation of FOSS Contributory Copyright Assignments and Licenses: Jurisdiction-Specific or “Unported”?. SCRIPTed (RSS)
DOI (original publisher): 10.2966/scrip.100213.177
Semantic Scholar (metadata): 10.2966/scrip.100213.177
Sci-Hub (fulltext): 10.2966/scrip.100213.177
Internet Archive Scholar (search for fulltext): Internationalisation of FOSS Contributory Copyright Assignments and Licenses: Jurisdiction-Specific or “Unported”?
Download: http://script-ed.org/?p=1063
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Summary
Acknowledges debate about necessity of copyright assignments and contributor license agreements but "presupposes that projects want to use CAs/CLAs for various reasons. If FOSS projects use CAs/CLAs, they should have a clear understanding of the private international law issues raised by these agreements, especially of the law applicable to contracts and copyright and the role of choice-of-law clauses."
Provides overview of some extant CA/CLAs and relevant law of Germany, Japan, and USA.
"Based on this analysis, it has been suggested to implement choice-of-law clauses in the CAs/CLAs to foster legal certainty for the projects. Projects should choose the law of their central administration as the applicable law. However, such a choice covers only the contractual aspects of CAs/CLAs. For all questions of copyright law which are not subject to party autonomy, the territoriality principle prevails. Here, projects should follow the model of ‘unported’ outbound licenses, and should use generic and neutral language. It may also be advisable to provide alternative clauses for groups of jurisdictions which adhere to similar principles in copyright law, e.g. to provide for the transfer or assignment of copyright for those jurisdictions which permit the transfer or assignment, and to provide an exclusive license grant for those jurisdictions which do not permit the transfer or assignment."
