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>>Jim,
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>>That's interesting in that it is in direct conflict with what my attorney told me when I was dealing with a state agency as a contractor. Of course I had a contract that said I owed the software and graned them an unlimited license to use it. But the attorney said that even if I didn't have that contract that the rights to the code were mine unless I was an employee or a contract existed that said otherwise and that contract would need to have explicit consideration for the copyright. He said the consideration had to be in addition to payment for time worked.
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>FWIW, I was able to verify this for free...
>It just so happens I married into a family with lots of lawyers, judges, & courthouse clerks. As I sat here catching up on what I missed in UT during the last very busy week, one of my husband's many lawyer-cousins brought his finicky snow blower over for my hubby to look at before winter sets in. Always nice to be able to swap favors with a lawyer ya know, and this particular cousin specializes in copyright law and I managed to get him to read about 50% of this thread. His response( after drooling over the length of this discussion) was that "if no contract exists, and you are not an employee, the author fully owns the rights to the code. The only way you can ever have an exception to that is if it is explicitly in writing."
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>I also bounced it off him what Craig B. has been saying about the rights passing at the end of the contract, and his response was very interesting. He said if his client was a programmer (well actually he said "a computer nerd like you Rox"), then his advice would be exactly what Craig was stating because you can never be sure of a final product until it's final. But if his client was a company looking to protect some sort of trade secret/development input, his advice would be to get the details of ownership in writing before any info is ever passed onto the programmer.
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>Also interesting, this cousin says that these laws where expanded to better define software useage a few years ago, and his firm had a big push of computer nerds paying for services. Nowadays, he says they usually never hear from the computer nerd until they are in a bad situation (like original post here). Instead, the majority of their work is the other side of the fence - the companies wanting well defined use of rights from contracter work. So much so they pay a large head hunter in the area for an annual mailing list of corporations that hire short term contractors only for IT services.
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>Now I just gotta convince said cousin to stop drooling because there is no way for him advertise nor get a mailing list off of this forum :)

Computer laws were changed a couple of years ago. According to my attorney, that's what made software patents a better idea than copyrights.