Re: Non contracted intelectual property.

A can own a work created by B if B is a full-time employee and the work was created in the scope of B's employment.  Alternatively, A can own a work created by B if B was an independent contractor and both parties signed an agreement saying that the work would be work made for hire.

Based on your summary of the facts, you might have a good argument that they do not own it because, even if you wrote it partly on company time, the job of "kitchen manager" would not seem to include writing a software program for inventory management and therefore, it doesn't sound like you wrote it "in the scope of your employment." But your employer might also have a good argument to the contrary, since at the end of the day, the program was written to facilitate the kitchen manager's job and that job *was* your full-time job. If the job description included doing whatever you could to improve the efficiency of the kitchen, writing a program might well come within that category. The cases are very fact-specific and I'm sure if one were to dig a little deeper, there are more facts than the ones you provided.

Jessica R. Friedman
www.literarypropertylaw.com

On Mon, 08 Jan 2007 15:00:15 -0500
  "Brian Lucas" <bcl1713[_at_]gmail.com> wrote:
> This is purely for my curiosity's sake as the situation
>has already been
> settled but I was curious if anyone could give me some
>information or
> maybe a case law or two to back me up. I was working
>for a restaurant
> in my area as their kitchen manager. They were
>completely lacking in
> any sort of inventory management when I started there.
> I decided on my
> own accord to write a little program in sql using Access
>(on my personal
> computer using my copy of access) in order to keep track
>of their
> inventory. I was never commissioned to write this
>program. I wrote a
> minimum of 75% of the program on my own time. A maximum
>of 25% however
> was completed on work time when I had some downtime and
>nothing else to
> do. When I quit my job, the owner and GM "claimed" they
>had talked to
> their lawyer and owned the rights to this program. I
>denied them and
> they "decided not to pursue it". Did they have any
>legal right to my
> software?
>
> Brian

Jessica R. Friedman
Attorney at Law
757 Third Avenue
Suite 1903
New York, NY 10017
Tel.: (212) 220-0900
Fax: (212) 973-9101

More information at
www.literarypropertylaw.com Received on Tue Jan 09 2007 - 03:05:00 GMT