Re: Lua Cookbook

[Steve Litt <slitt@...>]

On Thursday 06 January 2011 14:02:33 KHMan wrote:
> On 1/6/2011 8:55 PM, Tony Finch wrote:
> > On Thu, 6 Jan 2011, KHMan wrote:
> >> Are we going to lawyer-tag everything just because lawyers say so?
> >
> > It isn't hard and the cookbook won't be useful if you don't.
> 
> Not trying to restart this, just want to throw a few words out to
> nobody in particular, to contrast two different positions and
> maybe broaden some perspectives. If you think this is nonsense,
> you are welcome to either check an IP book or consider me a fool.
> 
> Position A is that of current IP lawyer thinking --

It's pretty simple really. Nobody in their right mind is going to sign over 
all rights, exclusively, or assign copyright to someone else, because then the 
author cannot legally reproduce his own work on his own website or his own 
book. So instead the author keeps copyright and signs over nonexclusive rights 
for the purpose of the cookbook. Everyone gets what they need.

The one exception to this is those who have signed an employment contract that 
specifies they sign over all intellectual property (the lawyers words, not 
mine) to the employer. In that case the would-be author can't participate at 
all. And of course such an author could not possibly profit from writing 
anything and should not write anything until X years after quitting, at which 
time the "all you are have belongs to us" clause times out.

I suppose theoretically if an employment contract stated that "everything you 
ever wrote belongs to us", the author needs to assign copyright to the Lua 
project before signing that contract.

SteveT


Steve Litt
Recession Relief Package
http://www.recession-relief.US
Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/stevelitt