Comparative Analysis of copyright assignment and licence formalities for Open Source Contributor Agreements
Authors
Andres Guadamuz* and Andrew Rens**
Senior Lecturer in Intellectual Property Law, University of Sussex.
** Senior Lecturing Fellow, Duke Law School. The authors are indebted to Catharina Maracke for her support in bringing together this special issue. We would also like to thank Florian Idleberger for his technical support in setting up the survey and retrieving the results. Finally, we must thank the Shuttleworth Foundation, which has been fundamental in allowing us to conduct the survey and conduct the study
This article discusses formal requirements in open source software contributor copyright assignment and licensing agreements. Contributor agreements are contracts by which software developers transfer or license their work on behalf of an open source project. This is done for convenience and enforcement purposes, and usually takes the form of a formal contract. This work conducts a comparative analysis of how several jurisdicitons regard those agreements. We specifically look at the formal requirements across those countries to ascertain whether formalities are constitutive or probative. We then look at the consequences of the lack of formalities for the validity of those contributor agreements.
