I'm wondering if, when working on source for your employer, people include a copyright notice.
For example
/*
* Developer : Developer Name ([email protected])
* Date : xx/yy/zzzz
* All code (c)2008 company name inc. all rights reserved
*/
or anything similar?
Never. However, our code is never distributed to anyone, including clients. IANAL though.
That really depends on your employer's policy. I have yet to work in an environment where it was enforced to add copyright info into source code. I think the largest factor in that is that if another company gets your code, you are likely to have bigger problems than copyright infringement.
My company does not enforce that practice. We don't share any of the source outside of our organization, and copyright is implied in the US, so it's not necessary. We have other "safeguards" in place, like confidentiality agreements.
The only place I have worked that enforced that practice was a consulting firm that maintained ownership of code that was reused in a project.
Clearly, this is one for a lawyer. As I understand it, the notice is not legally mandatory in the US, in that in the US you have a copyright whether or not the notice is included, but the notice does affect certain legal rights should there ever be an infringement suit.
My employer requires a copyright notice in our code headers, similar to what you have at the top. We regularly reuse our code at customer sites and retain ownership of that code, and the copyright notice (while probably unnecessary) serves as a reminder to the customer developers that we own the code and they don't.
Should it be that way? I'm not sure. I'm just a developer. :)
Yes. Required by company web standards along with contact and policy links in interface. Do not put in code. Sometimes in assembly configuration depending on whether it might be distributed elsewhere. Typically, I don't release source code.
At my company, we have a predefined header we have to include in every source file we create, whatever the language (C#, Java, and C++ mainly). This includes the copyright info along with that "no reproducing" message you see on emails. I use a Visual Studio code template when I create classes to automatically include the header.
To add to the answers by WILL M and Ben Combee, they are both correct as long as your code is to never be distributed outside the USA. If it will be distributed outside the USA, then check with a copyright lawyer to see what is the other countries copyright laws require.
I do, now.
The company I work for had a client in the past who proceeded to reuse and distribute code that we held copyright on.
While in court, they used the excuse that 'they were told it was open source'. While they were made to pay some restitution, they got off fairly easy as the judge found it reasonable to believe they had acted in good faith, and were merely ignorant.
Ever since, we include copyright notices in our proprietary code in order to make the 'ignorance' excuse a little less reasonable.
This is not something required by our company, but it is something we do on the project I work on. We distribute all source code with each version, and every file gets a proprietary statement. We keep that proprietary statement in a single file and use the C preprocessor to insert it into every source file when a version is released. For example:
/* Foo.c */
#include "prop.include"
void foo();
...
Which results in something like:
/* Foo.c */
/* This source file is proprietary property of Innatrode, Inc. */
void foo();
...
As Will M, Ben Combee, and WolfmanDragon stated, the copyright notice itself isn't required by U.S. law but it does unequivocably demonstrate to anyone looking at the code that it is actually copyrighted and also helps establish the date of the copyright. This can become important as it is the work with oldest provable copyright that will "win" in a dispute if two identical works are presented with different copyrights.
It would depend completely on how the code was to be distributed, and how you plan to release your code base.
For stuff which is freely accessible to the public e.g. JavaScript files, css even if they are obfuscated I would say that yes you need to have a notice there if you don’t want people to use it. Although that is not always going to work, even though the copyright is implicit it is easy for people to plead ignorance.
For code which you give to the client for hosting on their systems (compiled or not) we tend to give them a software licence agreement with the code and make them sign it instead of adding lines to each page, as i find every page having 10+lines for legal jargon at the top of my code page ruins its natural beauty! :P
Yes.
While the ignorance argument shouldn't hold up in court, it doesn't hurt to shut the door on it.
Simlarly, I always put a notice along the lines of "Authorised access only...." on the main page of admin control panels, just to shut down any arguments by someone that hacks in and then claims "It asked me what I wanted to do today" and "never said I shouldn't be here".
Yes. It is a manditory header for every file. We have a boiler plate for it
My team, until recently, had as one of our recommended guidelines that a copyright notice be included at the top of every source file. One of the lawyers in our company told us that putting that notice at the top wasn't necessary so now our guidelines suggest against putting any kind of notice at the top.
In addition we used to put info like author, date, and summary, but have chosen to not record those in source as 1) code owners often change, 2) the code often changes and the date isn't updated. Now if we want to find out who "owns" a piece of code we look into source control to see who has checked that file in recently.