15.10
I can certainly imagine that software reuse creates plenty of intellectual property issues, but it’s not obvious to me how these issues couldn’t be explicitly defined in a contract. Intellectual property issues are everywhere - when my wife and I were planning our wedding, we knew ahead of time when signing the contract with our photographer exactly what rights we had to our photographs and what rights she had to our photographs. For example, we knew that we should only freely broadcast (via Facebook, etc) copies with her signature in order to credit her for her work. We of course have copies for ourselves without the watermarks. This is the product that we paid for, and I think our photographer would have needed to charge much much more than she did for us to have the right to not give her credit for and access to our photographs for her own portfolio and promotions and such.
I realize that weddings aren’t rocket science or computer science, but there’s no reason that a very expensive and consequential business contract shouldn’t include every possible issue that could arise with intellectual property. Within a software company, developers [should] understand exactly what rights they have to the code that they develop and exactly what rights their employers have to the code that they develop. This is certainly true in scientific research at least. Scientific research often relies on a lot of infrastructure and equipment/staff resources, so typically the institution owns the scientific data while the researcher earns credit for their work. If companies can spell all of these issues out, then two companies working together in a contractual agreement should understand who owns what. I would think that a business would purchase the code that was delivered and forfeit any rights to future code based on that product unless they pay [lots of] additional money for the rights to the code. It doesn’t make sense to me that the purchaser owns the intellectual property - they simply own the software product that does something for their company. When I buy a book that someone wrote, I can’t then modify it and start making money off of my own version of it.