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

[ChangingLINKS.com]

On Wednesday 01 October 2003 01:09, 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. 

That's what I have been hearing.

> 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. 

Horrible analogy. 
I am thinking that it is more like a pro baseball player (programmer) getting 
paid royalties every time a game (or game highlights) he played in is shown 
on the air again. It is like the studio musician getting paid royalties each 
time the track is played on the radio. It is like the extra in a movie 
getting paid a cut each time a movie plays. It is like the photographer 
retaining rights to the family portraits of the customers.
In all of my examples, the entire project is funded by someone else whereas 
with your CD analogy, my financial contribution is much less than the cost 
that was incurred to get the CD in my hand. 

> That's
> absurd of course because copyright is not about a tangible asset but about
> intellectual property - ownership of your creation and ideas. 

That is TRUE. I agree.

> 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.

You are kidding right? 
I will probably get flamed for this, but I DON'T think most programmers ARE 
that creative - at least not the ones that get paid to code. 

An entreprenuer comes along with:
	1. The dream or idea (the creativity)
	2. The capital to finance the project and pay people for their effort 
	3. The will to assume ALL of the risk (regarding a return on investment).
The entreprenuer dictates what the program should do and all of the "rules."

Contrarily a programmer did not originate the idea, does not have any risk, 
and probably would not code the project - IF he didn't get paid upfront.
There is very little difference between a programmer and someone who makes 
hamburgers at McDonalds - or (if you want to get more complex) builds 
motherboards at Solectron.

How about this case: 
A project is very complex. It is have shuttled it from programmer to 
programmer and some of the code is written by the entreprenuer. (What makes 
it tough is that the entreprenuer can't let any one programmer understand the 
entire idea). The entreprenuer designed the each of the functions with psuedo 
code and the layout of the program.

					Who has ownership?

Do we try to look at the source code and figure out how many lines each 
programmer wrote? What about the lines that one programmer wrote and another 
modified? What if the entreprenuer did the debugging and actually got the the 
program to work "right?" At what point does the programmer's contribution get 
deminished enough until they have no ownership? What if the program that is 
being written is bought by someone for $500 million - how much cash does each 
programmer get? What about the programmer that I hired to fix 2 bugs? 

I believe that "by default" the intellectual property rights should go to the 
entreprenuer  and not the programmer.

-- 
Wishing you Happiness, Joy and Laughter,
Drew Brown
http://www.ChangingLINKS.com
>
> 	Ben Scherrey