Hi Jim,

There was an interesting case in the news here a few years ago. Eaton's, a large department store (now defunct) built their flagship "Eaton Centre" several years ago and commissioned a prominent artist/sculptor to do a work. They agreed on a flock of flying geese and these were displayed high up in a large atrium area and most thought they were a nice touch indeed.

A few years ago, outlining their plans for the year's Christmas decorating of the store, they advised that they would be putting a red ribbon around the neck of each goose in the flying flock as part of their displays.
The artist heard about this and took them to court to prevent this.

He won, which seemed surprising to me as I had thought that Eaton's had paid for the geese, they were theirs, and they could do whatever they liked with them.

Something about an artist's right to protect his work and to have it shown in a manner consistent with his ideas (and red neck ribbons were not his idea of classy).

The law operates in mysterious ways

Cheers,

JimN

>John,
>
>Ok some things here are getting confusing to me. I am referring to the Copyright, not the source code. The source code is a non-issue to me as I always supply the source code with my work. However, possesion of source does not infer unlimited right to how that source is used.
>
>I was told, that under federal copyright law, the producer of a work is the copyright holder for that work unless their is an employee-employer (work-for-hire as it was defined to me by the attorney) relationship exists or there is a written contract that specifically states that for the pruposes of the work in question there is assumed to be such a relationship, that is it is a "work-for-hire" relationship.
>
>Now, in the specfic situation I was facing there was a written contract that clearly stated that the client had recevied "an unlimited license to use the software within their organization" so this may confuse the issue a bit. There was no text in the contract that mentioned copyrights at all.
>
>The point he attorney made to me, and I am trying to make here, is that since the contract did not specifically state that the client would be the copyright holder I was. And that since I held the copyright I controlled who had which rights under that copyright within the limits of the original license granted by the original contract.