Protection of application codes (1 Viewer)

[The_Doc_Man]

does it apply to the MS Access that everyone have?
code that can exists everywhere?

Yes. Access code (and in fact, all of Office) is copyrighted by Microsoft. Look in the Help >> About or equivalent path for each utility, you will see that they have an embedded copyright notice.

The code that YOU add - the table designs, queries, forms, reports, macros, and modules can be separately copyrighted by you based on terms in the standard Microsoft End User License Agreement (EULA). That comes from the paragraphs having to do with redistribution rights for the Run-Time version of Access. It takes some searching, but it is there.

 

[Cotswold]

Regarding copyright :
If you are a company or independent writer then all code you have written and supplied is your copyright. No
other third party has any right to any aspect of it. If you give them the source do not be surprised if they sell
it. Or maybe abandon you and modify your software themselves. They have committed an offence by taking
your work and claiming it is theirs. You need to secure your software to prevent a company, or one of their
employee from selling on your software. Usually with some physical secure file or user number to which only
you have access and the ability to set.

If you issue your complete code for an application, it will include your own libraries, functions and procedures
that you have probably built over many years. That work the client cannot claim a right to and has not paid for.
However, to pass on all that work would appear to be ill advised to say the least. It may be actually one the the
main assets of your business. If you must or are obliged to issue your application code, exclude your libraries etc.

If a client pays you to write a package solely for them, the code is still your copyright. Unless you agree otherwise.

If you have a coder writing for you, who you instruct and employ, their work is actually your copyright.
Similarly, if you are an employee of a company, all of your work is that company's copyright.

There is no major difference in copyright ownership between a writer of books, songs or software.

In a similar vein. Do not sell the package to anyone. Only sell a license to use it, as Microsoft and all other major
companies do the same. If you sell it, it is possible that they can sell it on, depending upon your T&Cs. If you sell
only a license to use, they cannot do that. If they go into liquidation, having purchased a license to sell from you,
any company buying the assets cannot use your software. You then sell a new user license to them.

It's your time and expertise, protect it.

 

[The_Doc_Man]

If you issue your complete code for an application, it will include your own libraries, functions and procedures
that you have probably built over many years. That work the client cannot claim a right to and has not paid for.

If you don't clarify that fine point in the sale or license agreement, you leave the door open for the libraries to be treated under the same heading as any code directly created for the customer i.e. work for hire. This is an extremely touchy point and corporate lawyers are ALWAYS looking for the loopholes through which to drive a Mack truck and fully laden trailer.

When I was working as a contractor, there were the usual "company owns what you write" agreements. I had to tell the corporate bigwig that I could not sign that without certain exclusions. Since I am a hobbyist writer of fiction, the "simplified language" agreement was too broad. The exclusions had to list whatever I wrote away from the company on topics unrelated to the company's customer contracts. I also could not promise that code written while working for the company would belong to the company if it was written under an overarching contract that included some such phrase as "will provide code as required and will provide all company-written tools created to assist in performance of the contract." The U.S. Navy had one of those "code-grab" contracts. Turned out that the corporate lawyer was not up on Copyright law whereas I, as a writer, had to know about that to protect what I wrote.

 

[arnelgp]

the code is still your copyright.

did you Applied for it's copyright everytime you make a code?
if the code is bare, unprotected, then what copyright are you talking about?

 

[arnelgp]

U.S. Navy

c'mon, move on.

 

[arnelgp]

see post #20
Protection of application codes | Access World Forums (access-programmers.co.uk)

how would you know if your code was ever altered or pirated?
do you regularly pay your client a visit after turnover the deliverable?

 

[MarkK]

People want to do business with their friends. Anyone who hires you to work with their data is implicitly extending to you a significant trust. Build that relationship. Honour that trust first extended to you in the most honourable way you can.

I am a partner with my customers in their success. I sell a service which is, at its core, providing cool solutions to tricky problems. Code is a part of that, but to write useful code you have to talk to users, and you have to work with management to understand business requirements. The development process is iterative, and requires constant communication with stakeholders. If you have repeated experience with customers 'stealing' your work, maybe you have too narrow of a view of what, exactly, the 'work' is that they want done.

I do not think of my 'product' as code. I sell a comprehensive service. I tell my customers the code is theirs to do with whatever they want.

I am not looking for work.

Mark

 

[arnelgp]

If you have repeated experience with customers 'stealing' your work

it's not stealing, whatever i have Turned over it's theirs.
I have been in construction (power plants, refineries).
whatever ISO drawings we did, whatever revision, whatever
we finished erecting, whatever documentations we did on the project.
all are given to the client.
you don't have anything to call your own.

 

[arnelgp]

you have too narrow of a view of what, exactly, the 'work' is that they want done

go out there instead of cross stitching on your rocking chair.

 

[MarkK]

go out there instead of cross stitching on your rocking chair.

Says more about you, sir.

 

[arnelgp]

I tell my customers the code is theirs to do with whatever they want.

no more to add to this flocks.

 

[The_Doc_Man]

c'mon, move on.

Normally I do move on, but don't forget that it was relevant to the subject at hand.

 

[Pat Hartman]

I work for my own company which removes the middleman. The vast majority of the applications I build for clients are to their specification and not necessarily general purpose so not easy to sell and are work for hire. I have built two with potential resale and I own the copyright to those. Two others had such a generally useful concept, I used them in several other application. Not the code specifically since the code is table related and those things change from project to project. One of them I regularly post here for lookup table maintenance. That "mini-app" logic was developed 40 years ago using COBOL and IMS. I adapted it several other times in the mainframe world with different BE databases and its current incarnation is Access with either Jet/ACE of SQL Server tables. Who cares about the others? The other one is a way to manage thousands of word documents with bookmarks and the user gets to do the bulk of the work. It is all table driven and uses an Entity/Attribute table schema so the users can add new fields if they add a new policy type and have never used a particular field in the past and then map the field to forms and word documents so the data can be captured and bookmarks can be populated. Instead of waiting 4 months for the UK people to throw together some tables and forms, the user was empowered to build the entire new policy rules in anything from a day to a couple of weeks depending on how many endorsement documents they needed to map. The client loved this idea so much they built a web app to mimic my Access app because in the UK at the home-office they didn't use Access for anything because it is such a toy so they had to make it a web app but it took them three people and two years. I made the first cut in about a month and finished the bells and whistles in another two months. The app was linked to SQL Server and had about a hundred users from San Francisco to Paris, all working off Citrix or locally on our server in Hartford, CT.