[ale] [WAY OT]Reverse Engineering MS Visual Basic Applications

[Irv]

On Wednesday 01 October 2003 06:09 am, Benjamin Scherrey wrote:

> Unless you are an employee (and therefore the product is a work for hire
> owned by the employer) the copyright is automatically held by the creator
> of the work and must be explicitly transferred to the buying party. You'd
> be surprised how much software written is owned by the contractors (or
> contracting agency) and no-one, including the contractors, are even aware
> of it because there were no copyright assignments in place and people are
> generally ignorant of this fact.

You are probably right (IANAL), but think about this:
I write software. Consider, if you will, what will happen if I try to 
write software for company A, for which I will charge $10,000 and 
then, because I own the copyright, I then advertise the same software
for sale to company A's competitors for, say $500 a pop. 

I think they have a right to be mad. And to never contract my work again. 
(Much cheaper to wait for the $500 version, paid for by someone else)
They might also try to sue me for use of thier IP - that being whatever unique 
business methods of theirs I might have incorporated into the s/w I wrote 
for them. Clearly, their business methods must be to some extent "unique",
if not, they would have bought s/w off the shelf. 

> 	If you think the buyer should have all the rights then you would also
> believe that you own the copyrights to books and music that you buy. That's
> absurd of course because copyright is not about a tangible asset but about
> intellectual property - ownership of your creation and ideas. More often
> than not the buyer is purchasing a license to use this property rather than
> transfer of the property itself. Capitalist economies are fundamentally
> driven by this idea which seeks to reward and incentify those who create
> new ideas that benefit society and create new wealth.

But this isn't about copyright - unless the purchaser of your s/w is a 
software publisher who is going to package and sell your product. 
If the s/w is intented for internal use, as is most custom s/w, then it's an 
entirely different thing. If not legally, then certainly from a common sense 
standpoint.

For the last few days, I've had a carpenter here adding a room to my house.
He and his crew have a lot of intellectual property - that being the knowlege 
of how to build something that won't fall down, and will pass inspections.
Yet I can find nothing in their contract that says I'm only "licensed" to use 
this new room. In fact, I expect to be able to use it for the rest of my 
life, and not to lose the use of the room when the carpenter retires.

The carpenter and crew are likewise free to build other rooms for other 
people if they want, even rooms that look exactly like this one. 
That seems to me to be a good arrangement all around.

By the way - I've been a programmer for 20 years, and have built about 
15 houses. So don't even THINK about trying to argue that a programmer's 
rights should be different because he contributes "more intellectual input".
Both jobs involve putting together parts (mostly made by other people) 
to create something useful. The programmer has to build something which 
won't fall down daily. The carpenter has to build something which won't 
fall down even once, all the while following myriads of federal, state and 
local laws. Trust me, a good builder has to know a lot more than a good 
programmer does. 

I think that most businesses, when contracting for software, tend to 
believe they are paying the programmer to build something they can 
use (paying the carpenter) rather than subsidising an artiste. 

Irv