legal

Do you save the code you wrote at your previous jobs?

If so, how do you organize it? Do you refer to it often? Are there ethical implications? I have a bunch of tarballs lying around that I keep telling myself I'll organize some day, but I've yet to get around to it. And when I do sneak peaks at it, I find that it's mostly obsolete and not applicable to current technologies anyway. But...

What legal issues can I run into if I use example code (say from stackoverflow) in my projects?

A couple of questions I've read today discuss the legal implications of using someones code in your project: Can I legally incorporate GPL & LGPL, open-sourced software in a proprietary, closed-source project? Do you save the code you wrote at your previous jobs? This has left me wondering where example code found online fits into t...

Mutually beneficial IP/copyright clauses for contract-based freelance work

I have a copyright section in the contract I give to my clients stating that I retain copyright on any works produced during my work for them as an independent contractor. This is most definitely not intended to place arbitrary restrictions on my clients, but rather to maintain my ability to decide on how the software I create is license...

Can I legally redirect users from my commercial app to this web site?

The web site in question is www.eventid.net; my web based app will redirect the user to the site and send an event id in the url. The redirect will be: http://www.eventid.net/display.asp?eventid=1003&source=Microsoft-Windows-Security-Licensing-SLC Do you think I can do this? I have contacted the site owners with no reply. ...

Selling Your Own Company Your Code

I work for a large software company. On the contract I'm currently working on, I have to work with a grossly inefficient legacy application that we simply don't have the budget to fix, but which is very important to our customer. Just for fun, over the course of a few months, I wrote a new, much improved version of it at home on my own...

How can I secure legal ownership of code I developed on a project?

I'm working on a project where we develop a small solution. A lot of the code and the concepts I had previous to starting this project. I also put in a lot of my own time during the development. The product is not a very important product that somehow would give the company I work for any direct advantages but a simple monitoring product...

Screen-scraping of a proprietary website for academic use

A client of mine who is a social sciences researcher at a university is asking if I can write a spider to do statistical data mining from a subscription-only academic database. He would like to use the statistics for his academic research. (For those interested, this would involve downloading thousands of text documents and then doing l...

How can I collect user feedback without physically seeing my users?

Like probably a lot of software developers, I almost never see real users using my software. It is, of course, quite difficult to get good user feedback in this situation. Even if some users agree to give me some piece of information about the way they use the software, there's a huge difference between how they really use it and how th...

How to write a term of service and privacy statements?

Is there any privacy and term of service templates out there for developers who do not have the legal team to write those for them? Of course, nothing fancy, tricky or unusual about these that I want to put in there. ...

IT related Legal Advice for Contractors

I'm looking for free or inexpensive legal resources regarding programming contracts. There is of course the option of hiring a lawyer, but I'd like to do some leg work on my own to keep costs down. ...

What is the legality of putting projects in your web portfolio?

I have been with a company for over 3 years, and I have always put the work I do for them in my portfolio. Their company is unrelated to programming. They have known about me having the work I do for them in my portfolio. Today they told me that the work I do for them they own and to remove any all their projects and any reference to the...

Can I use the .NET framework logo on my personal calling card?

Before I get to have my calling card printed, I just want to know if I can use the .NET framework logo on my calling card. I want to make sure I have not violated some rights (I know you get what I mean). By the way, my calling card is for business purposes like ".NET development" and the likes. I just want to emphasize in my calling ca...

how to create legal documents workflow app with MOSS

hi, I have a requirement by a client to create a MOSS site which can be used to archive and track legal cases. the requirement is that each case has 4 logical steps which are assigned to particular people...each step requires a legal document.. Once a document for the first step is uploaded, a task should be created, requesting for step...

Liability/Insurance for storing client data

My company runs a web application which (amongst other things) allows clients to store and share information. This is a service they pay us for. My question regards insurance - what sort of policy do we need to cover this line of business? I'm coming at this without knowing much about insurance, so any information would be greatly appre...

What legal measures need to be in place before launching a business website

We are about launch our new business website that, as well as displaying information about our products, also allows our clients to log in to download their licences and applications. We have been told horror stories about websites being hacked and losing personal data then getting sued for millions (these stories came from the lawyer t...

How do you find a developer to work with when you're afraid they may steal your idea?

So you have that awesome idea for an app that you think will be very successful and is not technically difficult to make (but a struggle to do yourself because you're not that good yet) How would you go about finding a developer that's willing to hop on board, and how would you protect yourself from that developer just taking that idea ...

What risks are incurred when selling your own software without a corporation?

I plan on starting a simple micro ISV selling some dot.net and classic ASP components. I'm talking $50 components here, not anything major. However, I don't want to go through the hassle and expense of incorporating because, after all, this can fail miserably anyways like everything else I do. Plan is to put up a website, buy adword...

Legality of sampled sound clips in an iPhone app

Does anyone know the legality of using sampled sound clips (specifically spoken words) from movies as part of an iPhone app? ...

Legal preparation/NDA when shopping a new technology around

Several years ago I created some custom algorithms and code for processing CNC files (basically ways of controlling automated machines for manufacturing). Now, years later, I found suddenly that my small side project has come to the attention of one of the larger CNC companies and they contacted me and are very interested in it. I am now...

What's the closest OSS license on CodePlex to the CodeProject license?

There's some code on CodeProject that's already OSS under the CodeProject license. I've contacted the author several times on his blog, but he's not responding to any request for putting the code on CodePlex (or any email at all). Since it's OSS anyway, I thought I'd do it without his permission (and ofcourse give him all the credit). ...