Intellectual Property In Web Development

Copyright protects original works of authorship that are fixed in a tangible medium. This means that copyright covers both published and unpublished works. Importantly, copyright does NOT protect inventions, discoveries, or ideas. Instead, copyright law protects the way they are expressed. This is why trademarks are so important – they protect the words, phrases, symbols, or design elements that distinguish one company’s goods or services from another.

Ownership of copyrighted works may depend on the circumstances under which the work was created.

– Creator and first owner
– Works created for an employer
– Commissioned works
– Joint authors
– Co-written works
– Works created by students

The rules around copyright will vary depending on where you are in the world and where the work is produced. Under copyright law, the person who creates a work is typically presumed to be the owner of the copyright. However, there are some exceptions to this rule. For example, if a work is created as part of a work-for-hire agreement, or in an employer-employee relationship, then the copyright may belong to the employer. Similarly, contractors (and not the party that employs them) usually retain ownership of the copyrights in the works they create unless there is an agreement in place that assigns those copyrights to the employing party.

Patents are a form of intellectual property that give the creators of ideas, inventions, and works the legal right to exclude others from using, making, or selling their creations. In the United States, an inventor or multiple inventors must apply for a patent. Ownership can then be assigned to a corporate entity afterwards. Patent ownership can also be transferred to assignees and successors who then become proprietors of the patent. Patents are a type of property that can be easily sold or transferred. This makes patents liquid assets that can be used to exclude others from exploiting an invention.

A patent is a grant of a property right to an inventor of a novel, non-obvious, and useful invention by a government body. A patent guarantees a creator the right to exclude others from making, using, offering for sale, selling or importing an idea, creation, design, or invention. A patent does NOT grant the right to make, use, offer for sale, sell or import an idea, creation, design, or invention.
For information on Patents in the UK, there is useful information and guidance on the Government website

A trade secret is a piece of information that is not known to the general public and is kept by its owner to give them a competitive advantage. Trade secrets can include anything from a new product formula to a manufacturing process. Typically, trade secrets are protected through the use of non-disclosure agreements (NDAs) or confidentiality agreements.
A trade secret is information that is not publicly known and which provides a competitive advantage. Trade secrets can include formulas, processes, methods, or practices. The holder of a trade secret must take reasonable steps to keep it confidential.

A trade secret:
– is not generally known to the public;
– confers an economic benefit to its holder because the information is not publicly known; and
– where the holder makes reasonable efforts to maintain its secrecy.

For a more in-depth read take a look at The Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS) 

In terms of any designs or code, we remain the owner of the IP. This isn’t the same as owning your website. We won’t take any design or content that you provide and use it elsewhere without permission.
What we own are lines of code that we’ve written to provide your solution, and any designs we’ve produced. It is important for us to retain these rights because we’ll probably use small elements of code that we’ve used in the previous project for your project and code from yours for the next. For example, if we’ve already developed a Hubspot Integration and you’d like it to do something else we adapt that code rather than start from fresh. 

By default no. For example, you can’t make copies of your website or sell part or all of our code to someone else. You cannot buy one website from us and then make 10 copies to sell to other people without paying us. There is no restriction on your ability to sell the original website to someone else, for example when transferring business ownership.

Yes, we offer a ‘nonexclusive royalty-free annually renewable license” to use the code we provide, something which gives you the freedom to change suppliers, update your website or transfer ownership while maintaining our IP rights. This includes moving the website onto your own hosting and removing our access. It would not change our ownership of the IP.

No problem. We’re happy to have these discussions before or during an agreement. There are some things to note.
If you approached us and told us you wanted to sell the product we were making during Foundations, we’d probably already have the right contract in place. 
If something has changed, which is common, you may have had the idea to productise something that we built for you to sell to your clients or resellers, and then we can open negotiations.  As most of the time our clients are not competing with us we are able to draw up a transfer of Copyright or IP agreement to change the ownership.
You will need to be able to communicate what IP it is you want to own explicitly, we cannot assign ALL IPs. It is too vague and an untenable situation. It would probably be cheaper to make a new agreement and do the work again than unpick what has been done.