The copyright law aspects of the article apply everywhere in the United States. The gist of the article is that you should use an assignment clause instead of a work for hire clause. The work for hire clause is unnecessary.

The California law example was to illustrate that trying to be clever and including both an assignment clause and a work for hire clause could actually hurt you in some jurisdictions.

ah, thanks, that clarifies things a bit more for me.

That said, I'm writing from a Canadian perspective. And it's likely that our laws are different in this regard. I'll be looking it up within the next day or so.

EDIT: And I got curious enough to look it up quickly: http://www.gowlings.com/KnowledgeCentre/article.asp?pubID=22...

states that unlike the US, Canada doesn't have a work-for-hire provision, so copyright remains with the employee or contractor. Which is similar in effect to what's written in the OP. I'd want to corroborate that more before staking my business on it, but at the very least my point about checking the laws in your jurisdiction is important.

But isn't it always worth being clear and explicit about who will own what copyrights and and have what licenses to use/modify/distribute the material?

And it might not be uniform for everything in the project. There could be build tools that are developed that the client doesn't own but has a very liberal license to use while the actual product and source code copyright could be transferred to the client.

Your questions are reasonable. I'll add more: What if you're in Canada? England? France?

I suppose my comment was inane, but I hope that any freelancer not working in the States, should they come across this, will stop and do their homework. I'd hate for them to get screwed over. Freelancing is tough enough without factoring in bad contracts.

I'm actually in England. Copyright is pretty international by treaty (although in some countries like France you can't give away your moral rights but you can still grant licenses I think).

Employment (and what sorts of contracts imply employment) probably do vary much more by jurisdiction and may have tax, holiday, and other legal implications so I do agree homework is required.

From my experience freelancing in Germany, the standard approach there is to grant an exclusive, perpetual etc. license to your client for whatever you made under the contract, of which you as the author continue to own the copyright (Urheberrecht).

Isn't IP law federal?