FSF to begin accepting scanned signatures for copyright assignments from India

For our current assignment process, see gnu.org/prep/maintain.html#Legal-Matters.

The Free Software Foundation is striving to provide more and simpler ways for hackers to contribute to the GNU Project. For projects that are assigned to the FSF (such as GNU Emacs or GCC), dealing with the paperwork for assigning contributions can sometimes be a bottleneck in the process. We are always working on ways to make assignment itself simpler. Our legal counsel at the Software Freedom Law Center recently gave us the all clear to begin accepting scanned assignments for contributors residing in India. We would also like to particularly thank Mishi Choudhary of SFLC and SFLC India for providing local counsel on this issue.

Indian hackers will now be able to fax or scan their signed copyright assignment to the FSF, saving the trouble of having to go through the postal mail. We have accepted scanned documents from U.S. and German contributors for some time now. We also announced in 2015 that Italian contributors could assign using digital signatures.

The list of countries where we can currently accept digitally signed documents (scanned, Gnu Privacy Guard signed, or electronic signature) will be kept as part of the GNU Maintainer's manual.

Wondering why the FSF goes through all this trouble with copyright assignment at all? Prof. Eben Moglen explains why.