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Volunteers may of course donate their time freely - what requires a signature is when the organisation they are working for wants ownership of the intellectual property they produce.
So for example you could do "volunteer work" for mud X as a general admin, running quests and helping with player issues, and there would be no problem. But if you produced code or areas and the mud wished to claim ownership of them, it would require either a transfer of copyright, or a work for hire agreement.
"Any or all of the copyright owner's exclusive rights or any subdivision of those rights may be transferred, but the transfer of exclusive rights is not valid unless that transfer is in writing and signed by the owner of the rights conveyed or such owner's duly authorized agent."
"Copyright protection subsists from the time the work is created in fixed form. The copyright in the work of authorship immediately becomes the property of the author who created the work. Only the author or those deriving their rights through the author can rightfully claim copyright.
In the case of works made for hire, the employer and not the employee is considered to be the author."
"A “work made for hire” is —
(1) a work prepared by an employee within the scope of his or her employment; or
(2) a work specially ordered or commissioned for use as a contribution to a collective work, as a part of a motion picture or other audiovisual work, as a translation, as a supplementary work, as a compilation, as an instructional text, as a test, as answer material for a test, or as an atlas, if the parties expressly agree in a written instrument signed by them that the work shall be considered a work made for hire..."
"The determination of whether an individual is an employee for the purposes of the work made for hire doctrine is determined under "the common law of agency." What this means is that courts will look at various factors to determine whether the individual is an employee, such as:
* the control exerted by the employer over the employee (i.e., the employee's schedule and the hiring of the employee's assistants);
* the control exerted by the employer over how and where the work is done;
* the supplying of equipment for the employee's use; and
* the payment of benefits and the withholding of taxes."
I fail to see anything "pointless" about informing mud owners and developers about their legal rights. From the thread so far it seems obvious that many people are ill-informed about some of the details of intellectual property ownership and transfer, which IMO is evidence enough that this thread is not "pointless". And those who are already familiar with the facts can simply ignore it. In fact the only people who would lose out from this thread are those mud owners who falsely try to claim ownership of their staffs work.
They can write whatever they like, however the "". Saying that your contributions belong to them is no more legally binding that saying your firstborn belongs to them.
However the "". In addition to which, "".
The mud can claim the nonexclusive right to use the contributions for whatever purposes they like - no problem there. What they cannot easily do is claim ownership of the actual copyright.
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