[UPHPU] Application Rights

[Ray Hunter]

Justin Giboney wrote:
> As many of you know, I am developing a fairly large PHP application for 
> a friend. He was talking to a business coach about his ideas and such, 
> and she happened to ask him about copyrights, trademarks, or patents on 
> the application. This made me think about what rights we have as PHP 
> developers.
> 
> What do we need to do to legally protect ourselves and our applications? 
> Especially when we consider that a lot of the code we do is variations 
> on other people's code.

If you are doing coding for a company then you need to make sure you 
protect your intellectual property. Trademarks are good if you are doing 
some type of branding. Patents are really good if are doing something 
that is unique and new. However, patents are very touchy...one thing is 
don't run out and start reading patents. Sometimes it is better not to 
know which ones are out there already. Many big companies do patents to 
protect their ideas.

Basically, you want to protect anything that you develop.

--
ray