Japan: An open source community built a contact tracing app but the government doesn't adopt the app and building different app. I expect the app won't be open sourced.

https://github.com/mamori-i-japan/mamori-i-japan-ios

It's not entirely clear what's going to happen with the source of that governmental app, but at least, it's mentioned in https://cio.go.jp/sites/default/files/uploads/documents/tech... (last page)

Oh, I haven't read the sentence. thanks.

3) Germany : https://github.com/corona-warn-app (no discussion to be found at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23376682)

Looks nice! Why is "SAP" holding the copyright? In Italy, the government acquired the copyright of the app (it was donated by the company that won the tender to develop it).

Under German law copyright is non-transferrable.

However, the copyright holder can grant another party unlimited usage rights as well as waive the right to be mentioned as the actual copyright holder.

Both of these might apply here: SAP's and Deutsche Telekom's employees most likely have waived their right to be mentioned as individual copyright holders (which is a common stipulation in German employment contracts) while SAP and Deutsche Telekom have not, which is why they are mentioned as copyright holders instead of the Federal Republic of Germany.

You shouldn’t really call the German Author’s Rights Copyright, because it works dirfferently

I think the term in English is "Moral Rights" (Urheberpersönlichkeitsrecht in German but for some weird reason they're apparently different)

The legal system is different. However, copyright is the closest common law approximation.

I thought that you couldn't transfer copyright in Germany, only grant licences with all rights.

Like even as a developer, it's just in your employment contract that you grant all rights for work done for the company to the company.

SAP and Deutsche Telekom -- two large IT corporations -- are the main developers. I don't know why the government doesn't hold the copyright, maybe it should. They've released it as free software, though (Apache license).

As far as I know, in Germany copyright cannot be transferred. There is a special and limited exception for direct employees, so the company can hold the copyright, but I doubt that a client (like the government) could hold it.

IANAL, but AFAIK there is no exception for employees. The employee still holds the copyright, but there is usually a clause in the employment contract that gives the employer "unrestricted usage rights" for any copyrightable product of the employee.

Especially software developers should read those parts of their employment contracts carefully, as they may be overly broad and sometimes accompanied by weird clauses regarding their OSS work.

Not just unrestricted usage, exclusive unrestricted usage, which is why it could be a problem (instead of just being a simple case of dual licencing) if the contract claims rights to off-hours work.

German law has a clear distinction between authorship rights and usage rights. Usage rights, including reproduction, can be sold, rented, perhaps even taken illegally at gunpoint, I don't know. It's just your run off the mill intellectual property. But authorship rights cannot be transferred at all except through inheritance, it's simply impossible for A to pay B to relinquish the right to state that B is the creator of X. But outside of literature and music where special compensation schemes exist this is only about recognition and has zero economic relevance.

This authorship right is also only available to natural persons, so it's clearly not the reason why SAP and T-Systems are still claiming copyright. It just wasn't something the state buyer cared about and given that they apparently did care to get the code under Apache 2 I can't fault them, the result is almost like a reimentation of the recognition part for companies instead of natural persons.

What does it mean to inherit authorship? Can I be th author of something my grandmother created? Can I bequeath my athorship to some corporation?

Inheritance is very relevant in those special fields where a regulated compensation scheme exists in parallel to the sale of usage rights (literature and musical scores). The organisations that are responsible for distribution are kind of notorious for being dominated by heirs. Unsurprisingly, because current creators create, whereas heirs focus all their energy on maximising the harvest.

Another implication that occasionally comes up to freak everybody out is that there is some legal basis for creators to have a word in changes to their work, which can be a total PITA for organizations that once commissioned a building from a famous architect who left assertive offspring.

I was wondering this as well, I did some digging. It's really interesting actually, it doesn't seem that Germany is that much of a veteran when it comes to copyright (In the early 1900's they virtually didn't have any copyright law in place).

To your question, yes you can inherit something from your grandmother. Inheritance is designated by the original author, and enacted in the event of their death (As far as I can tell).

Source: https://www.gesetze-im-internet.de/englisch_urhg/englisch_ur... (Section 28)

I suppose the idea is Copyright.AuthorId is immutable but its member functions myCopyright.grantPrint() or whatnot() are callable

If the employee still owns the copyright, does that mean employees could continue to use that software after they leave the company?

I'm not German, but as far as I know they have similar system to the one we have in Poland - you can transfer exclusive financial copyrights to another entity but you cannot transfer personal copyrights (so that you can say that you are the author of particular work even if you cannot license it to 3rd parties). In practice, even though personal copyright is not transferable, many employers require you to sign additional civil contract in which you declare that you will never exercise your personal copyright.

In the granting of usage rights it is usually included that the employer will have exclusive usage rights as well (dependent on wording).

I don't know about the exact implications for creating very similar future work (what you would call "infringing copyright") though.

Copyright (at least the closest German equivalent of it) is non-transferable and automatically belongs to the creator, so it isn't really meaningful anyway. That's what licenses are for.

3) Poland's solution was also open sourced very soon https://github.com/ProteGO-Safe . While it could have more privacy protective, as long as it will have an option to turn the contract tracing off I will use it. Unfortunately despite the fact that creators of this app are privacy conscious I only heard about it from negative articles. I checked it myself and they are using centralised tracing system, only because Apple/Google decentrilised one isn't ready and it is a main concern in disparaging articles. I'm not saying that currently Poland isn't going into autocracy, but it isn't a tool in this machine. However with 10k installs in a 40m country it is useless.

For France: https://gitlab.inria.fr/stopcovid19

Austria: https://github.com/austrianredcross

The UK has an interesting post-hoc approach where the code is open source but only after release, with the git history squashed.

Discussion here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23107553

Wonder if any of the official apps are using reproducible builds, that can be built from their published source?