Open Compliance Summit 2019

When a work is authored collaboratively, a number of legal mechanisms can be employed to allocate copyright rights to the collaborators. These mechanisms range from acknowledging only one single person as the copyright holder to treating all collaborators as co-authors that share copyright ownership equally. Because open source projects are collaborative works, and because copyright assignment has significant legal ramifications, these mechanisms are an important topic in the field of open source compliance. This talk will cover the criteria used to determine which authorship model applies to a given collaborative work, the impact these mechanisms have on the rights and permissions of contributors, and best practices for establishing a collaborative authorship model that serves the needs of your open source project.