copyright
Can I assign a 2nd copyright to my employer
<p>We are using some of my pre-existing, personally copyrighted open source software libraries at my employer. Recently they have asked me to "fix" the copyright so that it is theirs.</p>

<p>I have no objection to them owning a version of the code, i.e. that they own the copyright to, however I want to retain the ownership and copyright of the original code as it existed before I came here.</p>

<p>Is there a reasonably painless way to achieve this?</p>

<p>Thanks.</p>

<p>Cross-posted from Open Source, per a commenter's suggestion.
<a href="https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/6230/can-i-assign-a-2nd-copyright-to-my-employer">https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/6230/can-i-assign-a-2nd-copyright-to-my-employer</a></p>

<p>Copyright can be shared, but that isn't going to help them. Shared copyright means you need permissions from <em>both</em> authors, not <em>either</em> author. That's one of the reasons Linux is under GPL2 - they'd need literally thousands of copyright owners to agree to change to GPL3. And no, that's not a majority vote. Everyone has a veto.</p>

<p>On the other hand, why do you need to retain copyright? You can agree to sell it, and retain for yourself the rights under the Open Source license. It can't harm to have this license grant noted explicitly in the terms of sale, though. </p>

<p>It is either mandatory or strongly advised to have this transfer of copyright formalized in a written contract, with an explicit statement of the amount paid for it. </p>

<p>The best response is to offer them a permanent, non-revocable license to the code.  You can license your code any way you want, in multiple ways, and this is often done with open source libraries.  This allows the software to continue to be open-sourced, but also allows your company the ability to extend and modify the software without having to abide by the GPL2 license.  It eliminates their risk, which is probably what they're concerned about.</p>
