The bottom line is:

Are you "taking" the (original) "table design" and creating a "competing" product ?

As far as I can tell, the answer is "no"; hence, you are not in violation of any real or implied copyright.

What you are in effect doing is "enhancing" a product that your Customer is using (and I assume is legally entitled to use).

This is no different from the "thousands" of "third-party addons" that are in existence ... like reports writers, frameworks, IDE's, etc. that all hook into the "first-party" product (eg. think VFP and R&R, MM, Codemine, etc).

The fact that your customer will only use your "enhancement" (and not use the original application) is beside the point.

If in the future you actually wanted to market your enhancement (ie. sell it to someone other than your "potential client"), your customers would basically need to "license" the original application (ie. the "database") from the "programmer" first ... unless you negotiate a "developer's" type-of license / royalty agreement yourself ... OR, of course, if you "redesigned" the database (in the future).

This all assumes that this "database design" is rather "unique" and not already "common knowledge" (in which case you would be free to use the design).

And the customer always "owns" the "data" ... unless some of the "data" was originally supplied by the vendor (eg. "factors" that the vendor may have compiled from their own sources).

>A potential client want to rewrite an existing application for many reasons but mostly due to poor service, bugs galore, etc from their existing programmer. They're suggesting I use the existing tables so as not to lose historical data. Without going into the logic for me to use their tables, does this violate copyright? The company does not own the code and the programmer won't give/sell it to them. As I see it, the code is the contractors but the tables are 100% the company's. But on the other hand, the contractor "wrote" the tables so it then is his "code". Please set me straight here.
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>This is not the first time I've encountered this problem so I guess it must happen around the world. ( The tables are NOT normalised, key words are used for field names, etc so I would be very happy for this to all go away as a copyright issue )
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>Thanks