Copyright assignments and the MAINTAINERS file

[Nathanael Nerode]

Robert Dewar wrote:
> Nathanael Nerode wrote:
> 
>> No, *I* don't, because I have no *interest* in the matter.  But IBM 
>> and Microsoft have the right to give out their customer lists, and the 
>> customers have the right to explain that they personally are Microsoft 
>> or IBM customers -- neither party can prevent the other from making 
>> the contract public.  That may not be great, but it seems to be the 
>> state of the current law, generally.  :-/
> 
> 
> Nathaniel, as you note, you are not a lawyer. You obviously know nothing
> at all (even at the normal amateur lawyer level) about contract law.
OK.  :-)

  The
> above is complete nonsense. Many sale contracts have explicit language
> prohibiting disclosure. Lockheed may have an enormous interest in 
> knowing whether Boeing has a specific contract or not, but that does
> not mean they can find out! The exact terms of many contracts are
> closely guarded proprietary secrets that can be protected even in
> court proceedings if irreperable harm would occur. Some contracts
> exist ONLY to ensure non-disclosure of certain facts and it is of
> the essence that the contract not be disclosed to anyone. There is
> an interesting contract of that type in a decision Anonymous vs
> Anonymous (from Judge Ramos of the NY Supreme Court, I know about
> it because my son drafted the opinion).
What a beautiful case name.

  This has to do with a hush
> money payment by some celebrity (anonymous) to an assistant (anonymous)
> to settle a sexual harrassment, invasion of privacy claim. The court
> ruled that the agreement prevented her from publishing a book about
> the incident. The details of the contract did get revealed in the
> court proceedings,
That's what I expected.  :-/

  but the critical information (who is anonymous
> and who is anonymous), which of course is spelled out in the contract
> is protected by the ruling, since it is of the essence of the
> contract (in this case, the relevant court proceedings are also
> closed to prevent disclosure of this information).
Right.

> Furthermore, worrying about what is legally required is complete 
> nonsense in any case, most companies would never disclose customers
> without their permission, regardless of legal issues, but instead
> because it would be a bad way to treat customers.
> 
> In this case, the issue is not whether there is a legal requirement
> or permission to disclose assignment contracts, but whether it is
> a good idea to do so, taking into account the fact that we want to
> encourage companies to sign these documents, not discourage them.
Right, OK, I see now that that's the essential point.

> I really don't like to continue this thread on the list, since it is
> content free and off topic, but the above was just TOO much 
> misinformation to tolerate. Hopefully the nice gossip about
> anonymous vs anonymous makes reading this irrelevant post a little
> interesting :-)

I stand corrected; thanks for the lawyerly information.

--
To go back on topic:

So how DO we find out if someone has an appropriate copyright 
assignment?  As the original thread noted, the current method (asking 
contributors if they have one) is really no good.

* Everyone with commit rights needs to have an open-ended assignment of 
some sort.  I presume that this can be checked by whoever grants commit 
rights (a small number of people)?

* Everyone *else* needs to have assignments too -- how should the people 
committing their work, which could be anyone with commit rights, such as 
me :-), check that these people have assignments?

* How are we to check whether someone's open-ended assignment has 
expired or ended for some reason?  Should we really check for every 
commit (the only way to be really safe), or what?