Copyright for the code was absolutely never assigned to Copperhead and was not written under any contract or employment agreement. There was absolutely no contract that would have given Copperhead ownership over my open source work.
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So, what contract are you talking about? There was only an incorporation and shareholder's agreement. This was long after the creation of the project (look at the timeline for yourself) and did not hand over anything to the company. I paid the same money James did for my shares.
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A company doesn't magically get ownership over my open source work from being associated with me and agreeing to sponsor some of my work. Google sponsored the same work, as did others. How exactly does Copperhead magically own years of my open source work James agreed was mine?
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Yep. Your copyright is not assigned to the company just because you've incorporated it.
That *can* happen, but it's not implicit.
That would be like your house belonging to the company just because you founded it. Doesn't make any sense.
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Well, maybe not like your house. Because the code is probably considered business critical, it wouldn't be crazy to have it included *explicitly* for that reason. But it would be explicit.
(Not a lawyer, but started a company, and this was my understanding as I went through it.)
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This is different depending on the laws of the country but for Canada it is understood that an employer owns the IP of an employee unless otherwise noted.
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It should be noted that the copyright of CopperheadOS belongs to Copperhead.
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Two things:
A) I'm not a lawyer, so I'm not going to comment authoritatively, just sharing my understanding as a founder who explicitly noted what IP/ Copyright I was handing over.
B) I'm on Daniel's side regardless
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James explicitly acknowledged on multiple occasions that I controlled / owned the project including the donations and all the code I had written before and after incorporating the company. There's no contract or employment agreement. He doesn't even try to refute these facts.
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He just bullshits around the actual issues. Facts: no work contacts, no employment agreement, no copyright assignment, no licensing agreement. He doesn't even dispute that. At most he peddles some bullshit that despite us both paying $500 per the shareholder's agreement...
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... he thinks that I somehow assigned my open source work to the company as part of paying the same amount of money as him for the same amount of shares. Shareholder's agreement made no mention of any code of the open source project. Incorporation certainly didn't do it either.
Those are the only 2 formal legal agreements. Anything else was just conversations / agreements between us and in those he explicitly acknowledged on multiple occasions that it's my project, my code and my donations to use as I saw fit. How about he responds to those facts.
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was there for signing the incorporation agreement and was cut out of the picture for the shareholder's agreement due to him not being active at the time. Many other people were around and watched the project from early on. We were always quite transparent about the setup.
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