Between an interaction on Twitter and a recent entanglement with a client, it makes sense for my first post to be about intellectual property rights.

I will make the argument that strong IP rights:

• Help the "little guy," namely independent contractors, not harm them

• Complement the shifting change in the labor model, especially as it relates to software

• Encourage the growth of, and investment in, the open source ecosystem

Independent workers

Individuals who perform work on a contract basis are known as "independent contractors" or ICs, which is opposed to an employer-employee relationship.

Though the independent contractor status is often abused by companies who expect workers to perform the job of an employee while calling them a contractor for tax purposes (called "misclassification"), there are rights that ICs gain as part of this trade-off which employees do not have.

Basics of copyright and ICs

One of the main differences between an employee and a contractor is that, generally:

• When an employee creates intellectual property, the employer will own it
• When a contractor creates intellectual property, they will own it unless explicitly assigned or licensed away.

When you write a[n original] piece of code¹, you have created a "literary work" which belongs to you unless you have explicitly assigned or licensed it away, just as if you wrote a book or a play (or even an original choreograph piece, according to the Copyright Act).

¹ For protection to apply, the code must be an original work, i.e. also be non-obvious enough to be copyrightable.

const sum = (a, b) => a + b is too unoriginal as to carry copyright protection.

This implies that the process of being paid to develop software and the process of assigning that software's ownership to a client are disjoint, but closely related, processes. Engineers need to be paid for their time in order to work, and then clients can take possession of the final IP when it is finished and the job is done, for a separate fee.

Though it is possible (and common), I am generally opposed to assigning IP in advance outside of extremely rare cases, as ownership of the underlying IP is one of the few leverage points ICs have in their work arrangements. Though there's a price for everything, the premium it should cost to write this kind of blank check should be so large that it's rare a company would want to pay it.

The main point being that, as an independent contractor, you retain ownership of any intellectual property you create unless you explicitly agree otherwise.

See A Recent Example below.

The digital labor model

The lyrics to The Workers' Song by Ed Pickford, as performed by Dick Gaughn:

https://open.spotify.com/track/1KFxcj3MZrpBGiGA8ZWriv?si=b175040c4af34fde

In the factories and mills,

In the shipyards and mines,

You’ve often been told

To keep up wi' the times,

For your skills are not needed,

They’ve streamlined the job,

And wi' slide rule and stopwatch

Our pride they have robbed.

Open source investment