On Wed, Apr 16, 2014 at 09:13:13AM -0400, Richard Fontana wrote: > On Wed, Apr 16, 2014 at 09:16:56AM +0100, Ralph Corderoy wrote: > > Perhaps the employment contracts from Red Hat, > > MontaVista, etc., prohibit the employee getting involved with copyright > > violation in a private capacity? > > You mean a prohibition on the employee pursuing or getting involved in > the pursuit of legal remedies for infringement of the *employee's* > copyright, or the *employer's* copyright? Or both? > > I can't speak for MontaVista, but as to Red Hat, the answer is > certainly not for the *employee's* copyright, and obviously not for > the *employer's* copyright.
Actually I wonder if I am confused by what you mean by "private capacity". I think now you mean "without getting the employer involved even though the employer is probably the copyright holder". As you've been recognizing to your understandable disappointment, the dominant assumption has been that the GPL is enforceable only by copyright holders. At one time I think this was even thought to have a policy justification, though I think that may have been rooted in confusion. Arguments have been advanced (mainly many years ago when the obsession of some lawyers with the GPL as a topic of inquiry and discussion was at a *far* more intense level than you see today) for there being bases of legal enforceability by the downstream recipient of the GPL-violating software. You can find some of this if you search a bit. Anyway, under the orthodox theory of GPL enforcement, if we're talking about employer-held copyrights, there's a limit to what an employee could do "privately" in the sense above. Sure, the employee can do some initial investigation on his or her own, requesting source code, etc. But it's somewhat irrelevant in such cases who the copyright holder is, except in the sense that some copyright holders are more active in enforcing the GPL than others. In the typical case of a GPL violation -- Bradley, if he reads this, can correct me if I am mistaken -- you have, in principle, infringement of thousands of copyrights. What I'm getting at is that the employer, even *if* it is a copyright holder, is not necessarily best situated to pursue the violation if it advances beyond the initial stage. Depends on the employer and who the alleged violator is, really. You brought up Red Hat; I know of some cases where Red Hat employees have attempted on their own to get device vendors or software distributors to provide source code in compliance with the GPL. They were not typically doing that as personal copyright holders, and they were not typically acting as agents (even agents on spec, if you will) of Red Hat. So, taking your question again: no, Red Hat employment agreements do not prohibit that sort of activity. I'd be really surprised to see an employment agreement address such a thing. - RF
