Of what stuff is a Website made? Or, more to the point, of what stuff is it not made? To me, that was the real legal question when a colleague consulted me about a dispute involving his client, a Web host-turned-developer.
The client had recently expanded and upgraded its in-house technical resources. However, it had neglected to refocus its legal mindset to reflect the technical shift it had made from building simple Websites, to developing powerful, software-driven sites and Web-based software. That oversight resulted in ill-suited contracts, and eventually jeopardized the company's copyright to a valuable source code library that it leveraged in projects for many different clients.
Fortunately, if you allow your technical insights to guide you in drafting contracts, you should be able to avoid this company's mistakes.
Whose Site Is It? What’s a Site Anyway?
Very often a customer will demand ownership of the intellectual property rights to a Website it orders. A customer can well argue that it would be tethered to the developing host if it didn’t own the site. This is a deceptively powerful argument that, in fairness, is difficult for many developer-hosts to refute. But therein lies a trap.
What does the customer bargain for when it orders a Website? What does the developer-host offer? With changes in Web development technology, the answers to these questions may not be as clear these days as they once were.
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