Assignment of Inventions / Copyright

[Greg Rundlett]

With Free and Open Source Software so prevalent today, I'm wondering 
what companies and attorneys are doing to change their boilerplate 
"Assignment of Developments" agreements to reflect the fact that an 
employee will not have authority to grant any ownership (because the 
thing is licensed under the GPL or other such license, and has joint 
authors *outside* the company).  It's not like I have a copyright in the 
httpd.conf file, although it may be treated as 'Confidential 
Information'.  Certainly I can not be barred from writing another 
httpd.conf file 6 months after I leave an employer.

I'm also wondering if anyone has some decent agreements (in the area of 
employment contracts) that strike a balance between corporate interests 
and employee interests.  Most of the agreements I've ever seen seem to 
be a) completely biased in favor of the company b) unrealistic and 
perhaps fatally flawed because of their approach, c) completely ignorant 
of the law, or at worst all of the above.  The 'traditional' approach is 
for a company to say "What's mine is mine, what's yours is mine, and 
what is not yours is mine". 

For example, I was reading last night about the actual things that are 
*excluded* by the copyright act (see below), and the list is almost a 
verbatim copy of the things included in my company's assignment of 
Developments and Copyright agreement.

As stated in the Copyright Act:

    In no case does copyright protection for an original work of
    authorship extend to any idea, procedure, process, system, method of
    operation, concept, principle, or discovery, regardless of the form
    in which it is described, explained, illustrated, or embodied in
    such work.

I guess one problem I have is understanding Copyright in the first 
place.  Sites like nolo.com talk about how computer code is Copyrighted 
from the moment it is written.  However, my installation of Smarty 
(templating technology for PHP) is the same as anyone else's, and I 
change the small configuration parameters to make it work for me.  It 
would seem that virtually all code and markup are/should be excluded 
from copyright, except and unless taken in it's entirety.  The Smarty 
system might be copyrighted as a whole, but I disclaim any ownership, 
right or trademark in the system, and so have nothing to assign to an 
employer legally.

If this is too off-topic, and there are good resources elsewhere to 
develop this thread, I'm all ears.  I've done a lot of looking, and the 
signal to noise ratio is killing me.

-- 
FREePHILE
We are 'Open' for Business
Free and Open Source Software
http://www.freephile.com
(978) 270-2425
Arbitrary systems, pl.n.:
	Systems about which nothing general can be said, save "nothing
	general can be said."

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