If not specifically spelled out in any contract language, who would own the source code and the subsequent program developed?
The company employing the programmer, if the programmer does it on the company's time.
Disclaimer: IANAL
In the United States, if you are paid for the work of creating the program, then the program is known as a "work-for-hire" and the employer owns all the rights to it. The paid worker who wrote the code does not retain any rights to it. In general, if the code was written to the specification of the purchaser, then that is a work-for-hire.
If the transaction was instead the sale of a software license, then the original author retains the copyright.
Courtesy the somewhat out-of-date Wikipedia article on works-for-hire, here is the citation from U.S. Copyright Law:
U.S. Code, Title 17, Section 101 "Definitions":
A “work made for hire” is —
(1) a work prepared by an employee within the scope of his or her employment; or
(2) a work specially ordered or commissioned for use as a contribution to a collective work, as a part of a motion picture or other audiovisual work, as a translation, as a supplementary work, as a compilation, as an instructional text, as a test, as answer material for a test, or as an atlas, if the parties expressly agree in a written instrument signed by them that the work shall be considered a work made for hire. For the purpose of the foregoing sentence, a “supplementary work” is a work prepared for publication as a secondary adjunct to a work by another author for the purpose of introducing, concluding, illustrating, explaining, revising, commenting upon, or assisting in the use of the other work, such as forewords, afterwords, pictorial illustrations, maps, charts, tables, editorial notes, musical arrangements, answer material for tests, bibliographies, appendixes, and indexes, and an “instructional text” is a literary, pictorial, or graphic work prepared for publication and with the purpose of use in systematic instructional activities.
Some written agreements contain terms which specify that the work in question is a work for hire. Even when the work is clearly a work-for-hire, these terms are included to reduce the burden of proving that fact at court. Once the agreement is made, a contract is created which defines the work as per the agreement terms. If there are no agreement terms relevant to the ownership of the work, then the terms from U.S. Law become part of the contract.
There is a distinction between the words "agreement" and "contract." An "agreement" is a (usually written) set of terms which define various acts or behaviors that all parties have consented to perform. A "contract" is an agreement plus the laws which govern it.
For example, an "End-User License Agreement" intends to create a contract with the end user. That contract, if formed, consists of the terms of the agreement, plus the applicable laws such as the Uniform Commercial Code (UCC) and the Digital Millenium Copyright Act (DMCA).
I am not a lawyer. Depending on your reasons for asking, you may be much better off asking one.
I'm not a lawyer, but I've spoken to enough of them to say with confidence:
It depends.
It will depend on local and federal law, and on the nature of your company. I would follow one simple rule: don't leave it to chance. If there is any question regarding ownership, spell out the rules in a contract.
Check out this post: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/111815/freelance-work-with-no-contract-who-owns-the-code
You can't possibly expect to get an answer to that question. It varies based on country, state or province, and sometimes other jurisdictional lines.
Asking anyone but your own attorney, who is familiar with the laws in the area in which you reside, is simply being foolish.
See this previous posting about a legal question. While not on the same exact topic, it discusses asking for legal advice on a website like this one in some detail. The bottom line: If you want to give up your house, your car, your bank account, and all of the other assets you have, accept legal advice from someone other than your own attorney in your own jurisdiction. Legal advice given on a web site like SO is worth nothing more than what you pay for it, and if you take it and screw yourself, it can be very expensive indeed.
depends a bit on what country you are living in.
But I think in general whoever is paying for it owns it and has full rights to unless you agree to something different in the contract. However, from what I remember of copyright laws, The Author of the code also has rights to use the code unless they specifically give that right up.
I'm not a lawyer but as far as my experience the rights to the code created belong to the developer unless one of the following occurs:
If you've developed the code on the company's time and/or using the companies equipment the company owns the code.
There are contracts that even specify that all of the code/patents an employee has created during his employment belongs to the company.
Code rights can be sold as well so if you've worked from home and developed an application for someone else then the code either belong to you or to that company in case part of the contract between the buyer and the seller is code rights as well.
I always assume that unless otherwise stated the code belongs to the person who paid me to create it. That seems safest, fairest and, to the best of my knowledge, most in line with US law. Just to make sure, when I write my letters of agreement, I state explicitly that the customer will own the code.
I am, however, careful to exclude both third party libraries and my own common libraries when assigning ownership of the code. With third party libraries I obviously couldn't legally assign ownership, but my own libraries (custom desktop components in Delphi, SQL composition utilities in various languages) could conceivably become an issue if there were to be some kind of dispute. For these libraries I grant the customer a non-exclusive perpetual license for use and modification.
Finally, I have on one or two occasions done work in which the customer did NOT own the code and in those cases that was explicitly stated in the contract.
As others have stated less clearly, in the United States, the contractor owns the code unless the contract states otherwise. There are two ways that the person who pays you gets the code:
It doesn't matter that they paid for it or that you typed it on their computer, or whatever. If you don't get paid vacation, or a pension, or get your income taxes deducted by the company, you're not their employee, and they don't own the software by default.
Keep in mind that there may be such a thing as a "statutory employee", which means that if you act like an employee (for example, you work in their office, use their computer, have no other clients, and get paid vacation), then for the purposes of the law you are an employee. This may not apply to you, but I would be careful of approaching that line.
I am not a lawyer, but I have some experience with copyrights.