Intellectual Property Rights

[Allen616]

501c3 App: Part 8: Q10

Document org's agreed intellectual property rights.

[BrandonKlotz]

http://ist-socrates.berkeley.edu/~scotch/maurer_scotchmer_oss.pdf

[BrandonKlotz]

http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.689.9825&rep=rep1&type=pdf

[BrandonKlotz]

Was reading about IP and collaboration and came across this https://opensource.org/licenses/NPOSL-3.0 which may be something to look into that all Citizen Labs sponsored projects are limited to use for Non-Profit organizations (non commercial is prohibited).

But somethings such as Organization Assets should be copyrighted such as name/logo.

Other assets that do not define the organization are "Open Source" or under https://creativecommons.org

[Allen616]

For clarity sake I think it would be good to document Intellectual Property Rights and Project Licenses. Intellectual Property Rights is what a participant can expect when working on a project. The license is what anyone who want to take our open source project and use as-is to implement or improve upon it.

It would probably be beneficial if Citizen Labs agreed upon the use of one of many available open source licenses.

[Allen616]

Here is a link to a Draft Intellectual Property Rights document.

https://github.com/citizenlabsgr/community/blob/master/governance/stacks/intellectual_property.md

[Allen616]

I like this document from 18F, "Practicing our open source policy."

https://github.com/18F/open-source-policy/blob/master/practice.md

[Allen616]

As I think about it more I like the simplicity in which 18F handles the issue. Basically with a single line, "18F team members should work with the strong presumption that all of their code will be public, throughout and after development."

[BrandonKlotz]

I really like how 18F says it.

[Allen616]

I do as well. It is clear and does not sound like "policy" written by a legal expert.