[jtuente]

US Copyright defaults to the author, it is only with employee contracts/agreements that one can forego the default and assign to the company. Something like the google license is there to help with making a clear distinction between google-owned copyright, author-owned copyright and author-owned copyright permanently licensed to google. Meaning that google will never be required to pay any kind of royalties for the author's work even after they leave employment at google.

[decode]

> US Copyright defaults to the author, it is only with employee contracts/agreements that one can forego the default and assign to the company.

I'm pretty sure this is not true. In fact, it's the opposite of how it actually works. There's an explicit exception in the Copyright Act for a "work made for hire". If you're creating a opyrighted work for an employer, the employer is always the author of the work at the moment of inception.

http://www.copyright.gov/circs/circ09.pdf