Comments by "" (@grokitall) on "The Redis Rug Pull Is Worse Than You Think" video.

  1. A lot of people are getting the law wrong here. First, copyright is created automatically for anything which does not fall under some very narrow restrictions as to what can be copyrighted. Second, the copyright automatically goes to the author unless you have a naff clause in your employment contract giving it to your boss, or you are allowed to sign a contributer license agreement and do so. Third, when you contribute to a project without a contributer license agreement, you retain your copyright, but license the project to distribute your code under the applicable license at the time you contributed. This cannot be changed without your consent. Fourth, this has been tested in court. In the usa it was found that the author and copyright holder retained copyright, and granted permission to use it under the applicable license. By rejecting the license by trying to change it, you are not complying with the license, and are distributing it without permssion, which is piracy. In a seperate case, it was found that when the company tried to enforce its copyright, and included code it did not own without an appropriate license grant, they had unclean hands, and therefore were not allowed to enforce their copyright until after they had cleaned up their own act. This leaves any company not complying with previous licenses with a serious problem unless all contributions are under a copyright licence agreement transfering the copyright to the company, and always has been unless they track down every contributer and get consent for the license chenge for every single contributer. If they cannot get that consent for any reason, then they have to remove the code of that contribute in order to distribute the software nder the new license.
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