| To add some detail to what others have said, to be a work for hire in the US it must either be a work made by one of your employees within the scope of their employment or all three of the following must hold: 1. You specifically ordered or commissioned the work, 2. There is a written contract that states that it is a work for hire, and 3. The work falls into at least one of these 9 categories: • a contribution to a collective work • a translation • a part of a motion picture or other audiovisual work • a supplementary work (e.g., foreword, illustration, editorial notes) • a compilation • an instructional text • a test • answer material for a test • an atlas For a long time contract software usually could not be a work for hire because it usually did not fall into one of those 9 categories. I believe in recent years some courts have decided that contract software usually does fall into one or more of them and so can be a work for hire. I don't know if that view has become widespread or is just confined to some federal court districts. Practically what this means is that when hiring a contractor you either put in the contract that the contractor will assign the copyright to you or that you will be given a suitable license to use the code that is pretty much equivalent to owning the code (irrevocable, exclusive, allows making and distributing derivative works, you can sublicense to others on any terms you want, etc). |