On 08/02/2009 08:41 PM, Arnold Krille wrote: 
On Sunday 02 August 2009 18:22:56 Patrick Shirkey wrote:
  
On 08/02/2009 08:14 PM, Ralf Mardorf wrote:
    
Arnold Krille wrote:
      
If you didn't sign a contract and work on a project, the
copyright is still yours
        
Are you sure? I guess (and I'm not sure) that if you did some kind of
work, e.g. being a developer for a company, it implies that the employer
will take on the copyright and that you aren't allowed to disclose
know-how, even if there isn't a special contract saying this. If I'm
wrong, this  would give me some thrilling views for my future, because
of my past and especially a friend could benefit from this, because he
did much more for other people than I did.
      
Just because you work for a company or contribute code to a company
doesn't give them exclusive license to your code.
You have to *explicitly* sign or give that right away.
    

Standard contracts for employees include that the copyrights of their 
productive work during company time is property of the company. And that 
includes software...


Ummm, that's my point. Unless you *sign* a contract or otherwise agree verbally or in writing you don't give away your rights to the code.

If you sign a standard employment contract then you may well have given away your rights. In fact if you sign anything you probably have given away your rights as that is usually the point of getting someone to sign something.

If you agree to it verbally or in writing you also have given away your rights if it can be proven that you agreed to the terms as contested in a court of law or deemed reasonable to contest in a court of law.

Ex. Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg paid 60Mil to the original conceptualisuers to keep them from dragging him through the courts even though he never signed a contract because they had verbal and written communications that Facebook was their idea.

In other words if someone gives you some code or even ideas for code and you agree that it is under their ownership and they have documents to back that up if the case has to go to court then you are not the owner of the code or the concept that gave you the idea/motivation to write the code unless you are preapared to pay some money to shut them up.

In this situation the issue is really if the code is worth contesting in a court of law and paying lawyers to do the contesting or bullying or in some cases paying publicity managers to make the case public enough to get the target to cough up some dough. At the end of the day it almost always comes down to getting cash out of the target.







Patrick Shirkey
Boost Hardware Ltd