Job Contract Copyright Waiver I am starting my first full-time job. It is a software job in the UK, I am a citizen of a different EU country. The contract I am about to sign seems very demanding about the rights to intellectual property. I would like to contribute to open source projects and write a blog (unrelated to the company's business) or take photos of nature on trips in my free time but at first look at the contract (below), it seems that everything I do will belong to the Company. Do I understand it correctly? Is this standard and I should just sign it, or should I ask to have the sentence "relevant to the Company's business" included in the first two paragraphs? (This sentence is from the third paragraph which, however, seems to be concerned only with "inventions".) The laws mentioned in the contract are https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/1977/37 https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/1988/48/contents Copyright, Inventions and Patents All records, documents, papers (including copies and summaries thereof) and other copyright protected works made or acquired by you in the course of your employment shall, together with all the worldwide copyright and design rights in all such works, be and at all times remain the absolute property of the Company. You hereby irrevocably and unconditionally waive all rights granted by Chapter 1V or Part 1 of the Copyrights, Designs and Patents Act 1988 that vest in you (whether before, on or after the date thereof) in connection with your authorship of any copyright works in the course of your employment with the Company, wherever in the world enforceable, including without limitation the right to be identified as the author of any such works and the right not to have any such works subjected to derogatory treatment. You and the Company acknowledge the provisions of Sections 39 to 42 of the Patents Act 1977 ("the Act") relating to the ownership of employees' inventions and the compensations of employees for certain inventions respectively. If, during the course of your Employment, you make any inventions relevant to the Company's business that do not belong to the Company under the Act, you agree that, if required, you will forthwith license or assign (as determined by the Company) to the Company all documents and other materials relating to them. The Company will pay you to such compensation for the license or assignment as the Company will determine in its absolute discretion, subject to Section 40 of the Act.
Basically, "in the course of your employment" means "while you are working, or should be working, for the employer". If you're not using company resources or time to create or acquire the works in question, and the works are unrelated to company business, they're quite unlikely to become the company's property. (Particularly since the company almost certainly doesn't have an interest in controlling the distribution of your vacation photos.) When you let your personal side projects and the company's stuff get intertwined, that's where the troubles begin. Works made on company time, or using company resources, or to do company-related things, may be claimed by the company, and this agreement basically says you'll cede ownership of the works to them, patents and all, for whatever amount of money they decide it's worth paying you.
Yes, you do. But you should not base your claim primarily on copyright, but just on the license contract you agreed to. It's typically much easier to prove that a party did not fulfill its part of a sales contract (here: Pay the agreed amount) than to prove violation of a copyright you own. Also, you then only need to sue one guy, and not care about every platform your game might be hosted on. This is particularly difficult here, since they have not done anything wrong. It's not their fault that the publisher didn't properly pay the programmer. They (very likely) got their copy of the game legally. For details, you should consult a lawyer. We can't give you detailed legal advice.
Probably Not The creator or owner of a piece of software does not in general have any copyright over the output when others run the software, unless that output is itself a derivative work of input supplied by the copyright owner, or forming part of the software. In this case the translation is a derivative work of the 19th century original, but that is assumed to be in the public domain. SAo google has no copyright on the resulting translation. But copyright protection is only available for &quot;original works of authorship&quot;. (See 17 USC 102 in the US, and similar laws elsewhere.) A machine-produced translation is not an original work, and it is surely not then work of the author of the overall book. However, the author would still have a copyright on the book as a whole. The legal situation is no different than if the author had simply quoted a 19th century work. One may incorporate public domain works into a later work, and that later work is still protected by copyright, provided that there is enough original contentr to make the work as a whole &quot;an original work of authorship&quot;. Others may use the PD [arts, or the original from which they are taken, but not the rest of the work (beyond what fair use would allow in any case). For example, I have made a number of posts here on LAW.SE. In several,of those I quoted sections from one of the numbers of The Federalist. That 19th century work is in the public domain. Anyone else may re-quote the passages I quoted from it. But that gives them no rights to use the rest of my work, except as the CC-BY-SA license or fair use permits. So the author would retain copyright on the book as a whole. But soemoen who merely quotes or uses the translated 19th century article but none of the original parts of the book would not be infringing that copyright. I say probably in the header, because I do not have any actual case-law to cite here. It is possible that some court has rules otherwise on the subject of the copyright on the output of a software tool, but I strongly doubt it.
Assuming none of these terms are defined elsewhere in the contract: A third party is a party (a person or company) that is neither you nor the other party to the contract (here, presumably the company that hired you). Since GitHub is neither you nor the company, it would therefore be a third party, and thus it would in fact violate that contract as written to upload the company's code there. Keep in mind that GitHub is not an autonomous system with no humans involved; it's run by a company of people, many of whom could theoretically access the code in private repositories. That said, from a practical standpoint, most companies aren't going to fire someone for a mistake made in good faith, especially if actual disclosure to any humans is rather unlikely. However, do remember that we don't know the company's rules, what training you may have received, what exactly you uploaded, or what regulatory/contractual rules they must comply with. Any of that could affect their decision-making, so you should take this as a general answer and use your own judgement when applying it to your situation.
Am I contractually obligated to follow that old handbook? Yes. Consider this: your employer gave you a copy of the handbook saying, "here is a copy of the staff handbook." Because of this, you know that the document in question is the staff handbook of your company, regardless of the fact that it bears an old name, and that the policies it expresses are part of the terms of your employment contract. If you were truly concerned that the document in question had no validity as the staff handbook, you perhaps should have expressed that concern by telling the person giving you the document that they appear to have given you the wrong document, because it bears a different name. By not doing this, you accept the terms in the document. On the other hand, if you do do that, you'll just irritate the people who have to produce a rebranded staff handbook so they can give you a copy.
There is a general common law doctrine of contract interpretation which tells us that ambiguities are construed against the drafter. In your case, had the employer intended to require two years of work (or else reimbursement back to them) they could have explicitly stated this. The fact is, the contract is written as it is for a reason, likely to entice you to accept the offer of employment. They softballed the requirements to get you to take the job and now they are trying to play hardball. I would hope that a court would find this and tell the employer to think about these clauses next time. The fact is, after a deal goes south is a bad time for an employer to start explaining what these terms mean. You have fulfilled your half of the bargain. If the facts are as you say they are then you satisfied the "best of my ability" condition. Another problem you might have is if the employer does not take you to court but instead continues to make threats, maybe sends a collections agency after you. In that case you will need to get an injunction to stop the employer. In other words, get a court to state that you do not owe them any money and enjoin them from continuing to as if you do. EDIT: as a commenter mentioned, a contract may explicitly provide that ambiguous terms will not be construed against either party.
Provided you are in one of the 170+ countries signatory to the Berne Convention (the current 10 non-signatories are, exhaustively: Eritrea, Marshall Islands, Nauru, Palau, San Marino, Iran, Iraq, Ethiopia, Somalia, and South Sudan), then copyright comes into existence at the moment a work is fixed in a tangible medium, not when it is published. The initial copyright owner is the author of the work. In cases of employment, the "author" might be the natural person who authored the work, or the corporate person who employed the natural author. To clarify your thinking about registration: copyright registration is a public record of authorship (or copyright ownership). Registration does not create a copyright, but is merely a recording of the copyright that was automatically created at the moment of original authorship. Depending on circumstances and jurisdiction, Alan might have a legitimate claim to copyright on his own work. However, he will be quite hard-pressed to find a convincing theory of law that allows him to publish the unpublished copyrighted work of other people without their permission. This leaves him either to admit defeat -- he cannot possibly own the copyright of his coworkers' code, so he cannot have legally reproduced it -- or else make the baldfaced lie that the code has no other authors other than Alan himself. For your company to disprove such a claim, you may employ sworn testimony of your coworkers, you may employ code analysis to show differing coding styles (suggestive of multiple authors), or you may show code backups or version control history showing the progressive authorship of the work over time by many people. (Sure, a Git history is possible to fake, but a realistic history with feature branches, "whoops, undid the typo in the last commit" messages, etc. would lend significant weight to your company being the original authors.)
Impressum Requirement Wow, based on your citations, you've done a lot of research on this topic. I'm just going to add one more reference, which is from the same site as your first German citation and has incredibly detailed and judicially referenced information on almost everything related to the Impressum. All my non-GitHub links are to sections of that page. Based on your research, I'm going to take it for granted that you understand that according to the Telemediengesetz (TMG), an Impressum is required on a web page if it is &quot;business-like&quot; (geschäftsmäßig), or if it helps, I prefer to word it as &quot;potentially commercial.&quot; I would have to argue that open source projects have to be seen as inherently &quot;business-like&quot; for the purposes of the TMG for two reasons: Some other legal person may have similar software as part of their business and might have the need to serve legal notifications to the owner of a GitHub project (TMG § 8 gives competitors the right to sue). Think potential copyright violations here. It is possible to build a more traditional commercial business around open source, for example what Canonical is doing around Ubuntu. Additionally, the common legal advice is to even include an Impressum on a personal blog, though I'm not aware of any court case having occurred at that level yet. In my opinion, a GitHub account can be seen as more &quot;business-like&quot; than a personal blog, and would follow that advice out of caution. I'll note that the XING situation you bring up is complicated. It centers over whether the content of XING pages is &quot;business-like&quot; according to the TMG. It may well turn out that some pages will need an Impressum and others won't. As for placing it in the project's readme.md, that might work but I have two concerns: The courts have essentially stated that the text of the link must imply that the required information under TMG § 5 is located there. For example, the words Impressum and Kontakt work, but the word Information does not. To me, &quot;readme&quot; is not sufficient, but this concern might be negated by the fact GitHub by default renders the readme.md directly on the project home page. While it has been ruled that the Impressum does not necessarily have to be directly on the home page (for GitHub, that would be the company's/users profile page), it must still be readily available in an intuitive location. I don't know if putting it in a project page satisfies the legal requirement. If it was sufficient, it's also likely that each project would have to have an Impressum so that it can't be missed. Examples The dominant pattern that I could find1 on GitHub is an off-site link to the Impressum contained in the profile page's byline right underneath the title. Examples: https://github.com/sedadigital, https://github.com/comsysto, https://github.com/znes, https://github.com/eSagu, https://github.com/TIBHannover. I'm almost certain this meets or exceeds the legal requirements. Example screenshot: Additionally, I found a few that had a repository specifically for an Impressum. Example: https://github.com/johsteffens. Since these repositories were clearly visible on the user's main page (either because there weren't enough repositories to make them span multiple pages, or because it was specifically pinned to the main page), I would argue these also meet the legal requirement for being readily available. While I didn't find any examples of it, another possibility would be to combine the above two approaches, having a link in the byline that links to an Impressum repository or some other page within GitHub. This would be useful if you didn't otherwise have an Impressum hosted elsewhere. There were also scattered examples of people placing an Impressum on a project wiki page or on an impressum.md file at the top level. However, none of the users I looked at were consistent in doing this across all their projects. Also as previously mentioned, it's questionable whether not having it on the main user profile page meets the legal requirement. The Wiki page in particular I don't think meets the requirement that it can easily be found. Found using the following Google search: site:github.com impressum -impressum.php -impressum.html -impressum.jsp -impressum-manager -github.io -issue. Exclusions meant to filter out a lot of false positives, mostly projects for websites that had their Impressum in code format meant for deploy and not for display on GitHub itself.