If I am correctly reading the Bitlaw thing you reference, a work made for hire gives the hirer ownership of the copyright whereas a work which is not a work made for hire (or done by an employee) belongs to the creator. So if a client hires me to write a program, we have no written agreement, I own the copyright and the client has an implied license. I still hold all transfer rights.

There is also some question as to whether even if there is a written agreement that a software project is work for hire it will hold up, since there are explicit types of work that can be works for hire and software is explicitly not among them.

Do you read this differently?

" The determination of whether a particular work is a work made for hire can be crucial to the hiring party's ability to utilize the created work. If a work is considered a work made for hire, the author and owner of the work is the hiring party. If the work is not a work made for hire, the hiring party has no copyright ownership in the work. The hiring party's ability to use the work would therefore depend either on the specific terms of its agreement with the author, or upon the concept of an implied license to use the work (see the BitLaw discussion on implied licenses for more information on this topic). If forced to rely on an implied license, the hiring party may find that it has only limited rights to alter, update, or transform the work for which it paid.

In addition, the determination of whether a work is a work made for hire affects the ability of a creator of a work to invoke her right to terminate the transfer of rights, which would otherwise affect a license or assignment (for more information, see the BitLaw discussion on the termination of transfers)"


>Under copyright law, if this is a work for hire (it sounds like it from what you said), you own all the copyrights until you sign them over at the END of the project. You can sign anything you want for current or future work, but it does not give your customer rights until they're signed over at the end.
>
>** Note that I am not an attorney, nor do I play one on TV. This is my understanding of software copyrights after discussions with an IP attorney **
>
>>For the past few months I have been doing contract work on a project by project basis for a local company. All is going well and we have a good working relationship.
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>>I just got a call from them asking about ownership of the code for these projects, and asking me to sign an agreement stating that they own the code. I have no problem with this.
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>>Should this be something that we both sign on a project by project basis, or could one agreement cover all work I do for them?
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>>oes anyone have a boilerplate Software License Agreement that I could look at?
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>>Thanks