Over at Naked Law the Cambridge boys are chewing the Clearspring gristle. This is a classic contract negotiation problem to IT lawyers: who gets the code copyright? The client may have given an elaborate expensive and detailed requirement to the developer for software critical to its enterprise and which it may wish to sell to others or develop further itself later on. Or the developer who may pour resources experience and general techniques into the software but which it needs to reuse for other clients? The client gets the benefit of this reuse in a lower price more stable bug free product, while the developer gets to reuse algorithms and patterns developed at great expense elsewhere.
At the moment the law favours the developer: copyright remains with the author in the absence of an explicit agreement otherwise. It was mooted that there should be a change in this position but the government backed away; wisely says Geeklawyer.
On the Naked Law site Geeklawyer wrote:
This is an area in which, as you allude to, the bargain between developer and client balances competing interests. Developers, of whom I have a number as clients, are keenly aware of the dangers of giving away their own IP. To do otherwise would put them in the invidious position of being unable to use some of the standard libraries and techniques that they have developed in a number of commissions. Clients get a better and cheaper product in this way. If the default IP position is reversed and developers are forced to negotiate a licence from their clients, or seek an explicit reservation of rights re libraries etc., all you’ve done is reverse the ‘inequity’.
The current position is the better one to have by default and clients such as Clearspring should take the consequences of failing to get obviously needed legal advice.
Nor is it immediately clear to me what general rules you could introduce, other than reversing the default position, that would make a sensible and comprehensible change in the current law. I suspect all that would happen is the introduction of more vague language about “reasonable expectations” or classic waffle such as “in all the circumstances”.
I can’t come!!!...
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