fp developer - Thank you

[Fairlight]

At Sat, Feb 28, 2004 at 09:37:18AM -0600 or thereabouts, 
suspect Rick Hane was observed uttering:
> 
> To all (and there were many) that responded, thank you.  I have selected 4 
> names and passed them on to the client.  They will contact those they are 
> interested in directly.  I do not feel right getting in to the middle of 
> this selection; however, who ever becomes the programmer please feel free to 
> contact me directly if you have any questions about any of the code.  None 
> of it is copyrighted and all source files are there.

That's -not- actually true unless you explicitly released it into the
public domain.  If the client did not retain copyright on it, say in the
context that it was custom code they contracted for and felt they should
own, then implicit copyright falls back to the author of the code.

Unless it's been explicitly released into the public domain via some
mechanism (a statement in the code or bundled with it, posting it to an
obviously public domain forum like USENET, etc.), -someone- holds the
implicit copyright.  Whether you choose to enforce any rights over any code
you wrote is another matter entirely.  But there is a distinct differenc
between not enforcing restrictions, and code not being copyrighted.  There
is a distinction between implicit and registered copyright as well, but the
lack of a registered copyright does not at all imply a lack of copyright.
It simply makes it more difficult to enforce your rights, although not
impossible.  Even lack of an informal statement of copyright does not void
implicit copyright.  It has to be explicitly released, as I understand it.

And since I believe you said you wrote 90% of the source, that leaves the
question of any remaining percentage.  Who wrote and holds rights to that?

I'm not trying to start an argument at all.  I'm simply saying that unless
someone owned rights to the whole lot, and released the rights, or everyone
that worked on it released the rights to their portions of the code, it
might not be as -technically- unfettered as you think.

Then again, those are really technicalities.  If the client doesn't care,
and nobody that worked on it cares enough to enforce any rights they may
have, it is essentially fine to work on for now, I suppose.  But while it
may be okay now, if someone ever decided to enforce their rights later, and
multiple portions have been combined into one product, someone could get
bitten one way or another.  I don't think that would necessarily happen,
given how relaxed you seem about it.  I'm just used to running in CYA mode.

IANAL.  But I've had interesting discussions about copyrights in the past.
And I'm referring to -US- copyright laws regarding implicit.  It gets even
more complicated if you deal with a foreign country, as their IP laws may
differ--sometimes in very key areas.

mark->
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