Michael -
in addition to what everyone else here has mentioned:

Ask your potential client to produce the contract from the previous programmer. There should be such statements as copyright holders, work product, intellectual property.

In my opinion - the table structure itself is the work product of the programmer, and as such he would retain the copyright to any work product UNLESS a contract mentioned otherwise - as the work product is the intellectual property of said programmer .

That being said - there's nothing to keep you from redesigning the data side - making the tables more normalized - even based on the original work product. The second you've added something to it - it no longer 'resembles' HIS work product at all.

Of course - the Company owns the data unless there was a clause in the contract that gave the programmer any rights to it [but that's doubtful].

If a contract does not exist - ask for the licensing agreement. Review the content there - and see what it says ..

HTH - mondo regards [Bill]

>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