Firrst, IANAL, and I am in the USA. As a person who does exactly this (recieve ideas from clients, write code using those ideas, deliver code to clients) for money, this is something I have paid attention to. If you wrote down your rules (or otherwise expressed them in tangible form) you own copyrights in that writing. If someone encodes those rules in computer code, and you did not establish beforehand that copyrights in the code will go to you (or that the work is a "work for hire"), the copyrights in the code belong to the coder.
This is not a bad thing, always. As a programmer, I need to be able to reuse code. So I can't have a really good chunk of code (like a mouse-event driver, for example) locked up by someone else's copyright. What I offer my clients as part of the deal is a perpetual license to use the code in any legal way, including making derivative works and publishing the code, while I retain copyrights. ~~James On Sat, Oct 3, 2009 at 9:27 PM, Hugh Trenchard <[email protected]> wrote: > Hi Robert. I subscribe to the FRIAM listserv, and have seen your note here. > > I'm wondering what the law is regarding the sharing of intellectual property > where one person establishes the general rules for a computer simulation and > then takes those rules to a programmer who then creates a specific program > based on your rules. Do you both share in the resulting simulation, or can > the programmer argue the simulation is his/hers? I am in a situation where > I have established the general rules for a simulation, and another fellow > has created the actual sim - so am curious to know how we should go about > claiming our respective intellectual property rights (hopefully they are > shared). > > Thanks and would be grateful if you could run this by Dr Winchell. > > Hugh Trenchard > Victoria ============================================================ FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org
