Developer Intelectual Property

What are my rights as a developer? Can I take my ideas and software I've created to market, or is everything I do while getting paid property of the company?

Maybe there is an option to rewrite my programs from scratch.

in 99% that is the case, but still depend at what the law and your contract say.



I would be careful doing that, as the company probably wont be that happy if you do it. Think you can be accused of industrial espionage too, as you get (steal!) a lot of information from the company to (re-)create a program for your own winning.

Drat, I thought that it was mostly the case. What's good is that I have no signed contracts with the company. There have never been any agreements or discussion about creative license or intellectual property.

The bad news is you have no contract. If you cash the check that's good for services rendered. The work belongs to the person whom paid you. See: work for hire. Exactly in the same way that I can't take the work I did for my company and take it to my next employer. Without a contract stating otherwise you pretty much screwed yourself. Get it in writing next time. Take a basic business class or two and learn about contracts and laws.

Note: I am not a professional attorney. If you really want an earful hire one for an hour.

I appreciate the insight!

You're screwed and you're not.

Without a contract, as already stated, you've performed work for hire and the results of that work are going to be the company's.

However, your thoughts and work you do outside of work are not owned by the company. And they'll have a difficult time pressing any confidentiality or trade secret claims without a contract showing they took active measures to protect their secrets. Doesn't mean they can't sue you and waste everyone's money; just that they're less likely to win.

Having actually been in this position before, thinking that I had better ideas than the company I worked for and could re-do their product in a much better way and make more money: there's a lot more to creating a successful business than creating code. Creating a marketable product customers want to buy is HARD.

Don't mistake your technical knowledge for business acumen. You'll end up wasting a lot of money on the wrong outcome.

One thing that you can do in the future if you just have certain parts of your code that you are wanting to reuse later on is to create a basic platform and sell a custom license where "your team" makes specific changes tailored to the company you are working with at the time, and then if the company is worried about confidentiality, you could look into various agreements protecting all parties involved.

Basically, most companies are not going to let you keep your work, even with a non-competition clause. If you are acting as a for-hire independent developer where they tell you what they want you to make and you make it.

If you clean yourself up as a legitimate development company that offers solutions based off of premade platforms, you can approach them and tell them what you can offer them.

Again, consult a lawyer first, but a good rule of thumb (without a contract) is if you come up with the idea on your own time, you are free to enter into contracts which may or may not limit dealing the product out to others as well. If you create something on their timecard because they came up with the idea or because you came up with something based on what company secrets they've let you in on, it's probably going to end up being their product.