Re:Police conducted search in the Nginx office due to a copy...
by MaxBarraclough on Thursday December 12, 2019 @03:46PM
(#21776254)
> what's to stop other companies doing this in a predatory way? Start an "open source" project, gather years of valuable contributions from a enthusiastic community, then pull the rug?
Pulling the rug would mean revealing that your company never really owned the copyright, so at the very least you make yourself look bad.
Also, I don't imagine courts take a favourable view of transfers of ownership which are essentially fraudulent. I'm not a lawyer, as you can doubtless tell, but I presume it wouldn't be good for you if they could prove you'd planned the thing from the start.
There's an analogy outside of copyright: stolen goods. Sale of stolen goods isn't a legal transfer of ownership, but you don't want to be caught knowingly selling stolen goods, much less proven guilty of it (and the whole point of 'pulling the rug' is that things play out in court). I presume a similar principle would apply with intellectual property.
Pulling the rug would mean revealing that your company never really owned the copyright, so at the very least you make yourself look bad.
Also, I don't imagine courts take a favourable view of transfers of ownership which are essentially fraudulent. I'm not a lawyer, as you can doubtless tell, but I presume it wouldn't be good for you if they could prove you'd planned the thing from the start.
There's an analogy outside of copyright: stolen goods. Sale of stolen goods isn't a legal transfer of ownership, but you don't want to be caught knowingly selling stolen goods, much less proven guilty of it (and the whole point of 'pulling the rug' is that things play out in court). I presume a similar principle would apply with intellectual property.