I had to jump in:
Work for hire means you were hired to do data entry or write a payroll program. You could be a W2 employee - you could be a 1099 employee. You could be one of those unreported employees (under the reported income limited). If, during you work for hire, you write a user guide or a program that will guide a robotic vacuum cleaner around the room, stuff outside what you were hired to do, then, without an agreement, the copyrights for the user guide and robot could belong to you.

If you snap pictures at an office christmas party at a company you were employed as a clerk, the pictures you snapped belong to you.

Without a signed agreement, the copyrights typically default to the author. But - we would be best advised to have an agreement.

BESIDES, owning a CR, is without value, unless the owner has the resources or market to sell it!

Many of us on this board probably own some very slick personal code. Are we paying asset taxes on it?

I resuse stuff all the time for when I work for "commercial" software shops. All of us do.

Imagine SW Co. A suing me for placing a "DO WHILE !EOF()" line of code in SW Co. B's program. It could get ridiculous. We would all have one project carrers.
RANTY TANTY OFFY WOFFY
.... so there
>Craig,
>
>Your assuming here that a contract - in order to have a work for hire term - has to use those exact words - it doesn't. Normally, those words are used because they are terms of art. You can have a contract that is completely silent on the issue - which then means you have the courts figuring out what term the parties would have intended.
>
>Bottom line, your analysis is/was incorrect on what work for hire means. Alan is correct here.
>
>>I read it...
>>
>>in Ken's case, we don't know if his contract stated "work for hire".
>>
>>
>>>I think we're still not in sync here. Usually the author is the subcontractor, and if he/she wrote the code under a 'work for hire' contract, he/she does not own the code. The contractor who hired the sub does.
>>>
>>>Read this: http://www.washingtontechnology.com/news/15_9/federal/1607-1.html
>>>
>>>Alan
>>>