IP protection itself is a toxic concept, specially in open source
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James has taken the path of fraudulently claiming ownership over our work since they aren't capable of doing anything more than poorly ripping it off. I own all of the code that I wrote for CopperheadOS.
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Some facts: I never had any work contracts to do work on it for Copperhead, and I never had an employment agreement or salary. I was not an employee of the company. James thinks he can retroactively go back and rewrite history to his benefit but it doesn't work that way at all.
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There was never any copyright assignment. The commits were clearly authored by me and attributed to me, using my personal email address. I used the company email address only for company business. The open source project was not company business. It started before Copperhead.
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It was explicitly agreed upon that it would be an open source project supported by the company, with the company building a business around it. There was explicitly no copyright assignment. James never believed in open source but was the agreement between the 3 of us ().
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It was explicitly agreed upon that developers working on the open source project would own their work on it, i.e. there would be no copyright assignment. The project was started in 2014, including incorporating previous work of mine. The company was incorporated in late 2015.
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The three of us signed a contract for incorporation and later on the shares were divided 50-50 via a shareholder's agreement since wasn't involved anymore. James and I both paid $500 for our shares. I never assigned ownership of any code to the company. Absolutely not.
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Also, not only did James regularly acknowledge that I owned the code I was writing for the open source project, but he was fully aware that I was contributing it upstream as the individual owning the code. I signed contracts with Google and others asserting ownership of it.
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I still own 50% of Coppperhead Limited (the incorporation had a spelling error, which says everything). James treats it as if he's the sole owner of the company and abuses his position as director. Goes beyond him fraudulently claiming that the company owns my open source work.
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He retroactively messed with the accounting and acted as if I consented to a bunch of things that I never did. There was no employment agreement, no work contracts, no NDA, no copyright assignment, no salary agreement, no pay stubs, etc. Their claim that I was an employee with...
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... a salary is clearly fraudulent. Ask James whether there was any employment agreement, copyright assignment contract, salary agreement, pay stubs associated with paying a salary, etc. There was none of it. I'm co-founder and co-owner of the company. I own it as much as him.