Re: What are a programmer's rights to what he writes?

In the absense of a contract, everything an employee creates is the property 
of the employee & everything a vendor creates is the property of the vendor, 
with right of usage by the company it was created for.

Case in point ... some employee has a problem with PC, so there is a call to 
a local micro computer store ... the screwdriver variety, not the supplies 
variety ... and someone visits to make some adjustments to settings & code on 
the PC ... that now belongs to the PC store, not to the company with the PC, 
in the absense of some contract to the contrary.

Most companies management are oblivious to these issues until a problem 
occurs, that they are aware of, by which time it is usually too late, when 
they were dealing with vendors.

> From: noerick.norcal@cleancity.com (Eric Kempter)
>  
>  To play devil's advocate for a moment.  Assuming the Brad is a salaried 
>  employee, doesn't his employer own any and all code that he writes 
>  regardless of when or where he does it?

I play computer games.  Suppose I write a program for a new computer game as 
part of my hobby, or ... I have had friends ask me to write a program to help 
them bet on the horses & I figured they were ignorant of the horse racing 
business, computers & just suppose the mob found out they were using a 
program written by me & members of the mob were equally ignorant of 
state-of-art of computers ... I turned down my friends request.  Such 
programs might have nothing to do with what I have been hired to do, but 
technically they may belong to my employer where I am paid a salary to be a 
programmer.

Al Macintyre  ©¿©
http://www.cen-elec.com MIS Manager Programmer & Computer Janitor
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