lare@clinet.FI (Lauri Hirvonen) (01/30/88)
There has been lots of writings of copying the software and what damages can illegal copying do to the programmers. But who really owns the software? Is it the programmer? Is it the company which pays salary to the employed programmer? I think this is not the same in every country. There is a new copyright law under preparations in Finland. The palaning group did study of the copyright laws in all major countries. They found, that a similar problem is in the area of inventions and to patent them. If the invention was made during normal working for a company, is the invention owned by the inventor or the company? Normaly (in Finland) a company pays extra money to the inventor and gets full right to the invetion (and patents). The case of a program: The programmer makes lots of new innovations into it. But today the program created under fully paid salary with all the tools and other resuorces of the company, is owned by the company. This is so, because software can not be patented (in theory in Finland). So the program is a product of just hard labor for which the programmer was fully paid and the output of the labor is therefor owned by the company. If the copyright of a such program is owned by the programmer (who wrote it) and not by the company (who paid full salary) major practical problems will be created. Today in practise all the programs (which comes out as software package from a company) are created of teams. Not just one programmer. And their work may be based on previous software (of that company) made by some other teams etc. Just imagine the list of copyright owners of that software package: Mr X, 3%, Mr Y 0.5%, Ms Z 2% etc. That type of software will never come out, because once the programmers finaly agrees on prosentages the software is allready obsolete. Should the prosentage depend on the time spent or the quality of coding? The planing group of this new finnish copyright law is now thinking, could the programmers be treated as artists are in current finnish copyright law. Example if you are a photographer for a newspaper (under full pay, cameras and resources) the photographer still holds the rights to the photos he has taken. If a newspaper re-use allready once publicited photo, the newspaper will pay extra to the photographer. So is a programmer a skilled hard labor worker or an artists? So who owns the copyrights of the programs? ---- Mr Lauri Hirvonen, a consultant, not a programmer.