Contributing code to open-source in EU?

[Ralf Corsepius]

On Tue, 2004-11-30 at 05:44 -0500, Robert P. J. Day wrote:
> On Tue, 30 Nov 2004, VJ wrote:
> 
> > Hi,
> >    I came to know that a legislation in EU says that all my work
> > (even the one that I develop at home, in my free time) is owned by
> > my company.

No, this is definitely wrong. I can't exclude it might be true in some
countries, but it definitely is not true in Germany.

In Germany, almost the opposite applies:

Any non-trivial, non-contracted creative piece of SW having been written
under your free will, is considered "creative art-work" and is owned by
you/copyrighted by you.

This ownership/copyright is non-assignable to anybody and protected by
Germany's constitution. I.e. you as the author of such a piece of
software can not give away your copyright - Once written, it will always
be owned by you. All you can do is to license it to others.


Contracted work is a different matter. In general, it is owned by the
contract giver.

This may sound complicated, but it actually isn't, when comparing it to
other domains:

* A carpenter who designs a table and sells a copy of this table to you
owns the copyright on the table you bought. You may use the table, but
you may not copy it.

* A carpenter to whom you bring the design drawing of a table you draw
yourself, to let him manufacture it, performs "contracted work under
your direction". Therefore he does not own the copyright, and may not
replicate the table, except with your permission.

Of cause their exists a gray zone.

The keywords are "free will", "non-trivial" and "creative". If they
don't apply, according German law, such work is not copyright-able at
all.

Ralf