What do you do in this situation?

[multimediocrity]

I thought of an interesting question today.

Let's say I pay someone to build me a site. This site is unique and provides a new service. Others see my site and want to get a site just like it. They contact the person who developed my site and they ask them to do the same for them. I now have competition.

I suppose the question is this. Would the developer have the right to do that? Would I have the rights to my site, or not? Could the developer build them a very similar site if they requested? Could the developer reuse any of the code used to make my site?

This is interesting, as I've seen similar things happen before. I imagine that if a person starts a business, anyone out there can copy it. I'm also sure that if a developer was asked to do a similar site, they wouldn't need to turn that person down.

Here's another dilemma I've been pondering. I pay a developer to build me a small app for my website, and I pay for it. Can that developer 'sell' that app to other people, or because it was designed for me, I have the rights to it?

[NogDog]

Caveat: I am not a lawyer. The following are only things to consider, but you should discuss them with a lawyer who practices in the field in your jurisdiction to determine what is truly legal and enforceable in your situation.

You may want to get a written contract signed by the developer with some sort of non-competition and non-disclosure clauses. If you truly have an original concept, you could also try to patent it, though that's not a given by any means depending upon what you're talking about and reasonable proof that there is no applicable "prior art".

Or you could find a developer who would like to become a partner in your business, form a LLC partnership or such with him/her with some sort of non-competition agreement, and make it financially rewarding for him/her to promote your site's success over that of any competition.

[opifex]

If I developed your app, I would most assuredly GPL3 it in MY name unless you paid me a LOT of money so that you had sole proprietary rights to the application.
Let's be serious for a minute, there is and always has been more than sufficient geek abuse throughout the years. I have had a lot of code hijacked over the years just because I happened to be working for some company at the time and the same has happened to thousands of others. GPL.... it doesn't have to be publicly released and it protects the author by prohibiting its use in proprietary code. If a client wants proprietary code it gets pretty sticky.... the author has to ensure that there is absolutely NO code integrated into the project that is covered by ANY of the open source licenses or "prior art". That can be tough... and really expensive!
What do you need... I am currently available and I could use some MegaBucks at the moment! :D

[JunkMale]

As you had the original idea, its your intellectual property as you employ a programmer to build it despite what the coder may think or what rights they think they have... the property is still yours. The most that they can claim is involvement in the coding process. If the programmer then sells that code written for you and what you have paid for, they have committed an offense under the copyright act and you can sue them.

Many people make the assumption that the coder has the copyright when the fact is they do not. They are "EMPLOYED" and like in any "EMPLOYMENT" anything that is produced during the period of employment with a person or company during that time period, the code belongs to the employer. Even if you write a nifty widget tool for a friend, the person employing you to work for them, that code also belongs to them!

So in your scenario as you describe it, you are the copyright owner regardless of what GPL or other limitations on code the code writer slaps on it.

If you started work for a big software development company tomorrow, you would find that everything that you do and provide in the way of innovation will belong to the company you work for unless you have a prior agreement with the company or person employing you, anything that is produced is subject to confidentiality and programmers simply can not just hock code that they have written to who they like after selling it to the original client or producing it for an employer.

Also, as a client, your entitled to a hard copy of all the code that you have paid for.

[NogDog]

Get it in writing. "If you started work for a big software development company tomorrow," you would find that one of the papers HR had you sign would detail their policy on (and your agreement to) intellectual property rights. When it's in writing, it's much easier to enforce, as opposed to a bunch of "he said/she said" arguments in court.

[donatello]

Never let a developer put a link to his/her site on your site. Never let them put any contact information in the code or header.

Then nobody will find them via your site.

Also, copyright anything you pay for. In the USA, this entails actually registering the copyright with copyright office and paying their extortionate $35.00 fee. You have three months from the creation of the IP (intellectual property) to do so. If you do not, then you cannot sue for lawyer's fees and/or damages. (This is in clear violation of the Berne Convention - to which the USA is a signatory... but that's another story.)

When you make your contract be sure to state that the copyrights go to you which includes layouts, stylesheets (if you paid for them) and any programming you paid for.

Still, all of this is only going to keep an honest person honest.
Some very popular sites with billions of page views have been stolen.

If your ideas are any good, someone will come along and steal them too.

This is why you should embed absolute links into your content wherever you can so that if there are some lazy content thieves, there is a chance that at least you get some link-love for your efforts.

You can also try to scare off the bandits with CopyScape or similar protection. http://www.copyscape.com

[JunkMale]

Nice link.

$35 !!! Thats well cheap.

[opifex]

As you had the original idea, its your intellectual property...

Copyright does not protect ideas, concepts, systems, or methods of doing something. You may express your ideas in writing or drawings and claim copyright in your description, but be aware that copyright will not protect the idea itself as revealed in your written or artistic work.
Source: copyright.gov (http://www.copyright.gov/help/faq/faq-protect.html)

This is why the lawyers created this mess and why it can be VERY expensive to create and protect proprietary code. IDEAS are NOT copywritable - the product of an idea may be copywrited by the person who created the work, but the guy who had the idea is essentially out in the cold unless he actively collaborated in said work.

I've been through this a time or two.

As far as work that is produced while being employed by someone... it gets more to who spends the most money on lawyers. If you are doing a "specific project," then it is more than reasonable that the code associated with that project is property of the employer. But what about something that is completely unrelated to the project? Does the employer have "rights" to ALL of your creative processes in ALL fields of endeavor while you are employed with the company??? Maybe and maybe not.... essentially you could write a database retrieval tool while working on a project that does not utilize a database and the company just might be able to claim that they have rights to your unrelated work. They did and they won... and so did the lawyers.

GPL3 can be used as a preemptive first strike in these cases. ;)

[JunkMale]

As far as work that is produced while being employed by someone... it gets more to who spends the most money on lawyers.
? Sorry, I just do not see it, if someone has or can prove ownership of the idea before a court then it is immaterial of who has the most money or that would not be justice in action.
If you are doing a "specific project," then it is more than reasonable that the code associated with that project is property of the employer. But what about something that is completely unrelated to the project? Does the employer have "rights" to ALL of your creative processes in ALL fields of endeavor while you are employed with the company??? Maybe and maybe not.... essentially you could write a database retrieval tool while working on a project that does not utilize a database and the company just might be able to claim that they have rights to your unrelated work. They did and they won... and so did the lawyers.
ANY work you do whilst employed by an employer as an employee or consultant belongs to the company, you will find it hard to get out of that one with the "Unrelated Works" clause.


GPL3 can be used as a preemptive first strike in these cases. ;)
a GPLv3 wouldn't stand up in court if you are being paid for said works...

Your employer has rights to anything that you produce whilst under their employment and you have to remember that these days, your employment with most companies covers the time your away from the office and while your at home and especially if the work field is computers, design of, software, etc.

If someone employs you on a personal level, same rules apply.

Simply ask yourself this question, would you pay someone to rip you off? Nope I didn't think so.

If the programmer is working for free and theirs no financial reward, then the programmer can slap a GPL3 on it as its free software

Remember that people who work in industries and certain fields leave their employment to work on their own ideas and this is to get around this employer and their fatties out of your pie scenario.

Theirs a big difference between doing things for free and things for financial gain and if you were employing someone that then writes a program on company time and it makes a million or three, you are going to be pretty *issed at the employee for robbing you of the time that they should have been spending on the project that they are employed to do. That is classed as theft and deception.

[opifex]

My particular case was with an oilfield exploration contractor that went belly up 15 years ago. The situation was later reviewed and the copyright was removed, but they did make quite a bit of money from the code. I have not worked directly for any company since that episode and have all my ducks in a row to prevent similar recurrences. "Unrelated work" is a very touchy subject as is the topic of "owning an employee 24/7" and there have been numerous court cases in many different countries related to bot with varying verdicts. One of the reasons I live and work in Mexico is that the Berne Convention and the UCC are respected by federal law and it follows that MY rights are protected also. Countries such as the USA, the UK and Canada tend to ignore parts of the conventions although they are signatory members. The EU Software Directive may be very helpful if compliance can be enforced.
The all important "greed factor" has a lot to do with this...
I'm not a lawyer either, but unfortunately have been caught up in a few things...
There is hope... Electronic Frontier Foundation (http://www.eff.org/) and others.

[multimediocrity]

That makes sense. I suppose it would be up to the owner (one who originally requested the site) to make a patent or copyright. The developer's job is to build what they are told.

[heptorite]

i think the contract with the development could help, and use information related the topic, if the contratc doesn t say enough

[multimediocrity]

Contracts are good. Is there a site which has free frameworks for legal documents like this?

[andr105]

As I know intellectual property is protected by the law, so consult a lawyer if you face up with this kind of problems in future. And, of course, it can be really useful if you know your rights - the better you know your rights the better you are protected from swindlers.

[Yelgnidroc]

Firstly, like most of the rest of us here, I'm not a lawyer, but here's my comments from a UK point of view:

As far as I know, if you are directly employed by a company and you write software for them, that company owns your software and all rights.

If company A asks company B to write a system, company B may employ whatever methods they choose, perhaps using parts from their software library that may be used in other systems.

It's like the "real" world. If you want a house building you might design the finished building (and possibly claim copyright on your design), but you can't claim copyright on the builder's methods.

You also need to remember that working for a company as an employee is very different from one company supplying services to another company.

I'm not sure that clients have rights to code that you write. If you're a client of Microsoft you can't claim any rights (or even obtain code) to their source code. Well you could claim rights but that's as much as you can do. That's like you saying to the "builder" that you have rights over how they've laid the bricks.

if you think you've got a valuable idea, write up a contract with your programmer and / or, as suggested, enter into a joint venture where you both benefit from the work.

Seek legal advice for whatever country you're in is the final bit of advice.

[Yelgnidroc]

Theirs a big difference between doing things for free and things for financial gain and if you were employing someone that then writes a program on company time and it makes a million or three, you are going to be pretty *issed at the employee for robbing you of the time that they should have been spending on the project that they are employed to do. That is classed as theft and deception.

Quite agree. Companies that employee people, at least in the UK, own all the IP on the work that the employee produces. (Unless, I guess, a contract decrees otherwise).

[opifex]

Seek legal advice for whatever country you're in is the final bit of advice.
This is the bottom line... laws are variable between countries (I do a lot of contract work for companies in other countries while I am in my own... tricky contracts sometimes) and in some countries the laws differ from state to state. In all cases it is a good idea to be very specific about each individual task that is part of the project and include the specific "rights" and "responsibilities" of both parties as applied to each task.
It is also a good idea to include an arbitration clause if permitted and recognized by law.

[multimediocrity]

How do you take out a copyright anyway? I heard in class that you get it when you publish anything.

[opifex]

Here is the best international reference on the subject, The World Intellectual Property Organization website (http://www.wipo.int/portal/index.html.en). "Copyright at moment of publication" is a concept of the Berne Convention for the Protection of Literary and Artistic Works and a copy of that and other international "intellectual property and patent treaties" can be found here (http://www.wipo.int/treaties/en/index.jsp).

[multimediocrity]

Thanks, opifex. That's a good collection of resources.