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The Display Centre
21 December 2006 11:04am
Good morning,
I am new to this forum and hope that my question is relevant.
I own a small business and have had an ecommerce website produced by a software house. This website was specifically designed to interface with the back-office routines produced for me by a close friend.
I now want to break-away from the software house and am clear that, whilst I own the design of my website, I have no access or rignts as regards the code which the software house produced.
So I am taliking with a local web programmer about me paying him to recreate my website exactly as it is now but so that I own the code and can do what I wish with it.
Ideally I would like to get to the point whereby the web programmer, myself and my friend can benefit by marketing the website and its back office integration. I have no problem with the web developer being able to use the code as long as it does not result in him competing with my friend.
Can anyone advise me as to the most logical way to protect and assign the IPR for the code which I am going to get the web developer to produce for me?
Thanks in anticipation.
Chris
Director of eCommerce at A well known Telco
21 December 2006 13:09pm
Simple answer is you cant.
Even if you make him sign something, you cant expect someone to "unlearn" something once he has been taught or implicitly learned how to do something.
I have been down this path a couple of times of late and this resulted in steering clear of agencies and using a freelancer. (their is less risk of one man competing against you than of an agency competing against you.)
The only way to handle this is to give him a list of "named companies" that you judge to be existing/potential competitors and write a clause about him not being able to do any work for them for a given period of time after completing your project.
Of course he might charge you extra if he feels this restriction is a potential loss of earnings longer term.
jon