[License-discuss] GDPR and code authors...

[Thorsten Glaser]

Antoine Thomas dixit:

>A famous cartoon about coders and development is joking today about the
>right for coders to delete their personal data in a project, because of

IIRC the GDPR/DSGVO has an exception for things the author published
themselves. An OSS contribution can be considered publication, AIUI.
There’s also… “berechtigtes Interesse”, don’t know the English term,
which *might* help. IANAL, TINLA.

The problem is that the GDPR/DSGVO is incomplete and the part with
the definitions’ estimates publication date has been moved to 2019,
as far as I was informed by a friend who knows more about this than
I do. No lawyer will give you an answer that’s less conservative
than to power off your servers, stop the projects, etc. right now,
because too many things are as of now unclear.

> - What kind of IP and license issues could this generate? For project
>owners ? For users and service companies?
> - What does it mean for copyright if some of the authors are unknown ?

Copyright is separate. The code itself is published under an OSS
licence (by the project, with the project or the contributor as
licensor), so nothing can spill over to that.

Metadata… I was told (see above for caveats) you can argue that
keeping the code author’s (contributor’s) metadata in the commit
logs is necessary for their and your “berechtigtes Interesse”,
because you might need to prove, under copyright law, who’s a
(co‑)author of the code.

Even if not, I highly doubt a requirement to rewrite already-
published history (be it git or a regular VCS like CVS) will
fall out of it, unless the presiding judge has never seen a
computer, or something.

But yes, I also am waiting for some questions regarding code
contributions and mailing lists to be clarified. Current advice
from a(n otherwise rather careful) DSB is to *not* write text
about everything you do, but to leave it open (both in wording
and in amount), so your own words cannot be used against you
later when things will have gotten clarified.

bye,
//mirabilos
-- 
I believe no one can invent an algorithm. One just happens to hit upon it
when God enlightens him. Or only God invents algorithms, we merely copy them.
If you don't believe in God, just consider God as Nature if you won't deny
existence.		-- Coywolf Qi Hunt