Re:The "Work For Hire" Doctrine Almost Never Works in Softwa...
by EGreg on Monday May 26, 2014 @09:50PM
(#7802474)
patio - that's very good advice!
From my own experience, I would also suggest in actual negotiations with clients to bring up the example of Wordpress and blogs. By making a blog for you using Wordpress, you don't come to own the Wordpress platform. This underscores the economics to a client based on a real life example.
The consultancy should have its own reusable "platform" (which it refers to in its standard contracts) which can include the knowhow, software and whatever else. The client is offered a worldwide, royalty-free, unlimited license to the platform, app and all its source code. If they balk, then you do copyright assignment, but of the app only, never the platform.
That way it's presented cleanly to the client in terms they can hang their hat on -- platform and app.
From my own experience, I would also suggest in actual negotiations with clients to bring up the example of Wordpress and blogs. By making a blog for you using Wordpress, you don't come to own the Wordpress platform. This underscores the economics to a client based on a real life example.
The consultancy should have its own reusable "platform" (which it refers to in its standard contracts) which can include the knowhow, software and whatever else. The client is offered a worldwide, royalty-free, unlimited license to the platform, app and all its source code. If they balk, then you do copyright assignment, but of the app only, never the platform.
That way it's presented cleanly to the client in terms they can hang their hat on -- platform and app.