Can you post links referencing that? If so, then I'd be interested in reading them.

Also note that copyright harmonization may not mean what you expect. Copyright is fairly well harmonized between NY and CA. Both states agree on what it means to be a work for hire, and that whether a specific work is for hire depends on the employee's local state law and your employment contract. Both agree that the penalties for copyright infringement are as is laid out by the US federal government. Courts from one state will take into account precedent from the other. You therefore cannot get a NY court to enforce a copyright claim against a CA employee when CA law says that is not a work for hire, and a CA court will not protect you against copyright trouble stemming from someone from NY improperly contributing code that is a work for hire under NY state law. But this harmonization notwithstanding, CA residents and NY residents live under very different copyright rules.

In short in this case harmonization means that the legal fiction of copyright ownership is applied consistently to any specific copyright, but the results are not consistent for different people.

My understanding of copyright harmonization in the EU is that it is similar to what exists within the USA. There is agreement on the basics of copyright doctrine, and the basics of how those rules are to be enforced. EU countries have signed specific treaties, sometimes the EU has clarified those treaties, and then individual countries have passed local laws to implement those treaties. Those treaties include terms for recognizing copyrights from other countries covered by the same treaties. But nothing stops there from being differing rules on who owns a copyright.

In fact the USA is signatory to many of those treaties. And as a result, I would fully expect that a German court would be willing to enforce a copyright infringement case from a NY employer on the basis of that work having been a work for hire even though done on personal time, while the same court will refuse to enforce a similar case from a CA employer on the basis of the fact that the employer cannot demonstrate that they own copyright.

In reply to Re^5: personal code? by tilly
in thread How do you show off your work to prospective clients? by punch_card_don

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