Re: Intentional reversions of rights clauses for "abandonware" right of authors.

On 10/11/07, Oren Beck orenbeck@gmail.com wrote:

Ok folks, here is a potential answer to the issue of "abandonware" . Possibly even a poison pill to the "buy a project to bury it" megacorp game too.

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IANAL, but

Practically everything I've ever done has fallen into the category "work for hire". That appears to mean (from lawsuits and threats of lawsuits that I've seen) that the paying customer (employer or customer of employer) is the one with the rights from the very beginning. You'd probably need to get that kind of provision into your employee agreement from the very beginning. I have gone to the effort to get a release from my employer to submit patches to a couple of projects in the past, just to be safe.