On 9/18/12 1:02 AM, Andrew Gray wrote:
One problem is that it's often not clear who actually *has* that authority in most organisations, even for someone within it. Where they deal with image licensing as a general rule (cultural institutions, publishers, media, etc) there'll usually be a system in place, but if not, the person we're dealing with will basically have to guess, or else keep referring it upwards until approved or, more likely, it vanishes into the ether.
The Free Software Foundation has a similar issue, in that people doing GNU work in their day jobs do not own the copyright themselves, and so the corporation must itself assign the copyright. The assignment needs to be signed by someone with sufficient authority, which in practice means vice-president and up. (I seem to recall that at least in the US, VP is the legally-defined rank at which a person can take actions that are binding on the corporation as a whole.)
Although it sounds like a significant hurdle, most corporations have a VP of marketing, who will likely see the value of making material available. It would probably be a good idea to develop a standard letter/form that includes all the right verbiage; the FSF example (found at the end of the GPL) has been engineered to withstand the scrutiny of a skeptical legal department, for instance.
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