Paolo Bonzini <bonz...@gnu.org> writes: > And even in the US we lost a patch for 4.5 due to a problem with the > disclaimer. I read this recently on gcc-patches:
> The FSF has a personal copyright assignment for me, but I could not > get one from my employer at the time, Stanford (according to > Stanford's policies they would not claim copyright on this patch). > I suppose that this referred to http://rph.stanford.edu/5-2.html which > shows that the matter is not black-and-white: > BOOKS, ARTICLES, AND SIMILAR WORKS, INCLUDING UNPATENTABLE SOFTWARE > In accord with academic tradition, except to the extent set forth in > this policy, Stanford does not claim ownership to pedagogical, > scholarly, or artistic works, regardless of their form of > expression. Such works include those of students created in the > course of their education, such as dissertations, papers and > articles. The University claims no ownership of popular nonfiction, > novels, textbooks, poems, musical compositions, unpatentable > software, or other works of artistic imagination which are not > institutional works and did not make significant use of University > resources or the services of University non-faculty employees working > within the scope of their employment. At Stanford, if you're on the academic side, Stanford mostly only cares about patents. Copyright generally vests in the academic author and the university doesn't try to claim any copyright on that. Work done for the university as part of the job of a staff member, such as my work done during working hours, is of course owned by the university under the work-for-hire provisions of copyright law and is a whole different kettle of newts. > Yet copyright.list has: > - 3 disclaimers from Stanford dating back to 1989 > - 10 contributors with a Stanford email, all without a disclaimer > So? Stanford has a lot of staff as well as faculty and students. :) Universities are akin to both large villages and moderate-sized corporations. We have multiple significant internal IT departments, and some of us do significant free software work. Whether or not you need a disclaimer given Stanford's copyright policy is going to depend on the nature of your relationship with the university and the contribution. The problem, as I alluded to in an earlier message, is that this is all relatively easily handled under the copyright policy on the academic side of the house for students and faculty. But if you're staff doing free software work as part of your job, finding someone at the university who will sign the disclaimer is extremely difficult. I can say from my 15 years of experience working here that in general Stanford *hates* signing legal documents. This is true even of procurement contracts. Stanford negotiates legalities very aggressively, negotiates vendor contracts very aggressively, and does not generally sign things unless the university has some compelling reason to do so. This is, from the university perspective, an obviously correct legal position since it keeps the university out of trouble from documents that they didn't need to sign. In order to get a disclaimer signed, the last time I investigated this, I would need to go through the Office of Technology Licensing because the central IT staff are probably not people with sufficient authority to sign such a document on behalf of the university. All university intellectual property is handled by the OTL. And the entire purpose of the OTL is serve as steward of university property and hence to handle the university's intellectual property to the university's advantage (mostly around the income that the university derives from licensing of its patent portfolio; we hold some patents that came out of the Human Genome Project work, for example). They don't have much of an incentive to sign such a document, and their first concern is going to be how much it might cost the university to do so. It's much simpler, from their perspective (and somewhat understandably so) if I just don't contribute to FSF projects on work time unless there's some particularly compelling reason for me to do so. Most of the free software work I do on university time I release under the copyright of the university with a free software license; the university is more comfortable with that than with signing legal agreements with third parties, at least for things that are not particularly central to the mission of the university and therefore warrant the time and attention required to vet the agreement. This is all a digression, as I don't have anything to contribute at the moment -- this specific case is not a problem that anyone needs to try to solve. I describe it in this much detail just so that people are aware of the sort of challenges that the policy creates and that contributors need to work through. Please also note that much of this information is about ten years old, and the situation may have changed somewhat. -- Russ Allbery (r...@stanford.edu) <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>
