The USA hasn’t managed to completely impose their idea of intellectual property on everyone yet. Some countries you can’t sign away authorship even if you can commercial rights.

Parent objected to:

> You'd need a custom license where everyone in the world could use the results except for the contributor

> That one is incompatible with copyright laws in many countries outside USA.

Does authorship confer usage rights?

I am unsure if I fully understand your point, so let me ask a related question to see if I understand.

For many open source projects, there is a CLA (contributor license agreement) that must be signed before contributions can be accepted. The Free Software Foundation (which holds the copyright for most/all? GNU tools) is pretty in/famous for requiring it. Their reasoning: If there are copyright violations, they have the time and financial resources to pursue the violators.

Are you saying that these CLAs and their intended purpose are invalid in some jurisdictions? If yes, please share some examples. To be clear: I'm only interested in "normal/regular" jurisdictions that have at least accepted the Berne Convention.

In fact, many countries don't let you sign away your statutory rights in general.