LabVIEW
Copyrights: LabVIEW Program developed by a company
@Coolsky wrote:
A company has developed a LabVIEW application for our test benches (in the industry). Now we need the source code and we want to buy it so we can modify the program the way we want independently from the developer (the company). The company states that since it develops similar (however not identical) programs for other clients, it cannot sell the source code because of some copyrights or something like this. Could someone please explain to me very briefly the whole thing about intellectual property, copyrights and licenses.
No, we can't. There have been multi million dollar court cases fought over copyright and/or intellectual property rights and both sides of the fence have believed to be right and have found lawayers willing to fight their case for them. In other words if you really want legal advice, then contact your lawayer and don't rely on fuzzy, misguided, uneducated and often plainly wrong information from public discussion fora, especially if they are technically rather than legally oriented.
Fact seems to be that the company is not willing to sell the source code to you. Their reasoning may or may not be flawed. If the software was indeed completely developed by them, then I don't see how copyright law would disallow them to sell the source code since they own the full copyright on the entire code. However if they bought parts of the source code somewhere else then copyright may indeed apply, if they did only purchase the right to use that code to create applications but not to distribute the source code itself to anyone else. Many source code licenses are like that, since the original seller clearly wants to prevent the buyer to eventually compete with him on the market with his own product.
This might be what is at play here too, if they own the full copyright on that code. It would not be that copyright itself prevents them to sell their source code but rather the fear that if they do so, someone might start to compete with them in the market with their own applications once they sell the entire blue print.
So if they own the full copyright it is their full right to decide if they want to sell a limited rights license to their code to anyone or not and if they purchased part of the code from somewhere else they may indeed not be allowed to sell that to anyone else. Unless you can proof in court misconduct of business by them, you will not have a good case to force them to sell you the source code in either case.
It may seem strange to some people but there doesn't normally exist a law that forces someone to sell anything to whomever wants it. It is always the sellers decision if he wants to sell something and under which conditions and the buyers decision if he wants to buy it. Of course usually there is an interest to sell things if the price that can be asked is reasonable, but what is reasonable can vary greatly especially if emotional aspects come into play.
But no matter what, it's most likely not so much copyright itself that is at discussion here but a somewhat emotionally loaded situation after some time of disappointments on both sides. The only way to get out of this is not to start pickering about copyright laws and other legal matters but to honestly want to get to a resolution that is acceptable for both sides.
Never again... I inherited a project with some code that we "own" and some that is part of the vendor's "product" that we don't. I'm in the process of writing another function to replace one of those black-boxe functions that isn't mine so I can't fix. The fact that password-protected block diagrams in LV 8.2 are easily circumvented doesn't help me; it's a matter of principal.
Ranting aside, you may be better off just paying them to modify it the way you need it, or pay them to develop an API that you can hook into.
@ejkaiser wrote:
It depends all on the development contract. In my projects I mostly insist on my company's exclusive ownership of source code. And of course my company has to pay for that.
Cheers
Edgar
Well exclusive rights has a price, and a very hefty one. It would mean for us that we can not use any existing code and have to develop everything from scratch. That is usually not useful for both sides. It also means that we have to calculate the full potential risk of anything that could go wrong during the project.
A more sensible approach may be a limited rights agreement where the buying company gets the source code as well as rights to use them for internal use only. This usually means that it is ok for the client to let employees make modification to the application source code but not hand it over to a third party developer to let them develop a new version or entirely other applications based on our code.
That way we can reuse existing libraries to integrate into the application and also potentially take some libraries developed during the course of the project for other projects and the customer has the assurance that he won't sit with a black box in a few years that he can't exchange a rusty wheel inside becuase he hasn't the possibility to look inside the box.
In most cases the customer anyhow comes back to us to have modifications done as that is usually faster and quicker than having someone possibly dig (again) into LabVIEW and get familiar with the application architecture.
@JKMM wrote:
I'm not a lawyer, but this is how it has worked in my experience:
The ownership of the code depends on the contract your company has with the company who wrote it. If it was not in the contract that your company owns the code developed for the project, then the intellectual property (the code) belongs to the company who wrote it. If this is the case, your company could offer to buy the code after the fact if the company who owns it wants to sell or license it to you, but you should definitely expect to pay for it, and it won't be cheap. Sometimes a company will contract another company to write code and want exclusive ownership of the code after its done, such that the code cannot be used again even by the company who wrote it, but this kind of agreement typically comes with a hefty fee because the company writing the code loses all future income they could make with that code.
It gets even more complicated when dealing with the (US) government. Generally speaking, anything you don't explicitly mentioned as being developed by the company can be claimed by the government as their intellectual property. The reasoning, if I remember correctly, is that the code was developed on software that was bought for that contract with money the government ponied up for development. If you don't claim it, they can. Something like that, anyway. The advice we always get is, "copyright everything and consult the company lawyers if you have any questions."
