ok, question for all those who law orientated.

[DarkKnight69]

I you were the legal owner of a company, which dealt with a large customer, base and had many employees. You have a website, and an office set up to take contacts. One of your graphics design artists draws up a logo for use. After about 3 months of the logo being used by the company and having the website state it belongs to the company though it is not legally copyrighted, the graphics designer get pissed at work and quits. Is he/she entitled to MAKE you remove the logo, claiming it is his/hers even though it was done as work for the company and verbally expressed it is the property of the company????

 

[Whoozyerdaddy]

I had an interesting conversation with an intellectual rights attorney a few years ago. He was a client of ours.

I had created a programming system for a remote control that our company sold. This system was the base for every controller we sold. He asked me who held the copyright to the programming. The answer was nobody. He told me that if I filed a copyright on the programming that I would own it. I could take it with me if I quit and I could demand payment for everytime it was used. It didn't matter that it was created on company time. It was my brain that invented it therfore it was my intellectual property. If the owner of the store filed copyright on it before I did then he could claim ownership of it.

So as far as I know... whoever files for copyright on the logo first owns it.

As I recall, Bill Gates started his empire by copyrighting unprotected material developed by others. (???)

 

[Czar]

Very often when you sign up the job contract it states that what you create for the company is owned by the company

 

[DarkKnight69]

So it can be copyrighted if it was created on company time right? By the company .

At the time, it was very casual work, very early in company creation...no contract regarding content!

 

[Genx87]

If they were working for the company with the knowledge the company was going to use this logo, unless otherwise noted in a contract I dont see how that person has any right for that logo.

 

[Harvey]

Originally posted by: DarkKnight69
So it can be copyrighted if it was created on company time right? By the company.

Nope for a couple of reasons:

1. If you never covered the work with copyright protection, the graphic work became public domain when it was publishe.

2. Even unprotected artwork may become a trademark if it is used often enough and widely enough by a single company and becomes clearly associated with the company over time.

Trademark coverage may be limited to protection in areas of clearly overlapping interests. For example, two companies can use the same name if they are in very different businesses. For example, a company called, Jones Brothers construction company may be able to claim protection from another construction company using the same name, but not from a restaurant.

OTOH, AT&T failed to protect the famous "walking fingers" logo for their yellow pages:

In 1961, the walking fingers logo was introduced to encourage consumers to "let their fingers do the walking" through the Yellow Pages. It became one of the most recognized and well-known advertising themes of all time. One of the biggest corporate oversights in history was AT&T's failure to trademark this symbol. Therefore. the walking fingers logo is in the public domain

Originally posted by: DarkKnight69
At the time, it was very casual work, very early in company creation...no contract regarding content!

In that case, a court would probably find the work is the property of the company. Their case would be stronger if they paid you anything for the work, and the fact that you haven't previously claimed any rights to it, especially if they actually used it in practice.

 

[piasabird]

A program and the Code are two different things. Please keep this in mind. The right to a program and the right to the code that compiles the program are 2 distinct and different things. If you sell software you are not selling a right to the code. If someone hires you to write code it is the property of the employer. If the company buys a program then they are not buying the code, only a software license. Software can not legally be copywrighted. The same code is used in programs everywhere. You did not invent the program language you only took bits and pieces and strung them together. Those same bits and pieces are available for everyone who buys the compiler. There may be exceptions if you are a free lance programmer and work on a contract. Then it goes by the contract.

In some instances some platforms or applications may come with the code and you may have a right to alter the code. We have the right to alter our code for our school software but not share it with schools that do not have a license for our product. This is a little different. Usually a company pays a maintenance fee for the software and the programmer is required to fix the code as needed or as business requirements change (within reason).

You can not really copywright program code unless you wrote the programming language and have exclusive rights to the compiler and it is really your original unique work which you did not copy from some other source and has never been used before.


You can not copywright software programming code.

You can not copywright software programming code.

You can not copywright software programming code.

You can not copywright software programming code.

 

[Titan]

Originally posted by: piasabird
You can not copywright software programming code.

Yes you can copyright source code. If that's what you mean by "software programming code." I worked at a big company where all the source code had to have a copyright statement at the top, and all of my work became property of the company. Furthermore, I worked on code which we liscenced from an outside vendor to have access to the source for internal use, which made our derived work subject to the original terms of that liscence. I had to take a class on how copyrights work and how we have to be careful of being contaminated by the GPL.

In the US, all creative works are automatically copyrighted. By the creator, or the creator's employer.


Edit to the above post: if you mean executables, I belive those are copyrighted too. They are definitely liscenced. If I write an app in assembly it is definitly copyrighted by me. If I use a compiled language, the source code is mine, the generated executable is subject to the terms I agreed in from my compiler. I would think I would have that copyright too and it is probably in the EULA that you cannot freely distribute the binary file and let people decompile it just because you have a liscenced executable on a disk.

The trick with copyrights comes to liscencing. A copyright owner can put any legal requirements on those whom the owner designates with a legal greement known as a liscence.

Personally, I agree code should be copyrighted. I don't agree that it should be patentable, as it is in the USA now.

 

[DarkKnight69]

i am not the graphics artist, i am an emplyee with the company. I was under the impression that the artist had no right to the logo as long as the company was using it for business! A trademark is cheap. Right now they are cunsulting a lawyer, but maybe ill just suggest trademarking it! Then the artist will have no right to it, correct?