Copyright for collaborative group

Question

Is there a recommended copyright (eg as BSD is to licensing) agreement type of template that could be used or altered for collaborative software work?

I aim to start a collaborative work that would potentially be non-open-source, but would like to ensure that all parties feel their work is protected and that all shared work is fairly benefited from.

I know there are documents out there, generally in the open source arena, for licensing or copyright of works; such as BSD, GPL.

Are there any of these already in existence that will apply to such a situation? (Please don't hate me if there are and its blindingly obvious! I know very little about such stuff ATM).

Are there known templates for such an agreement?

Or would a custom document be better?

Thanks

EDIT: I guess that as a portion of the work will be idea generation the agreement may need to include patent matters, or the like, and possibly non-disclosure terms as well?

Answer 1

The problem starts with identifying who gets the rights. For open source it is easy—everybody. But if you want to restrict it, you need to identify the members somehow.

Having everybody grant rights to everybody else in the group is impractical, because everybody would have to update it when new members join the group and if some of the original members left (or worse, died), it won't be possible any more.

So you need a juristic person—corporation, association, foundation…, something. Then granting the rights becomes easy—the members simply sign that they grant exclusive rights for given works to the organization. And the hard part becomes defining how the organization accepts new members, how members leave it and how it decides which third parties it will sublicense the work.

Which is not something for which there can be a template, but organizational bylaws are usually public, so you might be able to find bylaws of organizations with similar issues for inspiration.