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Man Sues Kazaa For Copyright Violation... Saying They Stole His Code
from the seems-like-a-stretch dept
While the entertainment industry has been throwing lawsuit after lawsuit against Kazaa for aiding and abetting copyright violations, a Microsoft programmer is claiming that Kazaa is guilty of direct copyright infringement - of his own code. He claims that he wrote the original code for Kazaa as an independent contractor, before current owner Sharman bought the technology from Kazaa B.V.. He says that he never had a contract with them, and thus, they had no right to sell his code. This seems like it would be incredibly difficult to prove. Clearly, there was some kind of (at least) verbal contract between the parties, or why would he have written the code for them in the first place?
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Work-for-hire
In USA it is black-letter law (it was tried and appealed all the way to the Supreme Court): if a work is performed without an express work-for-hire contract, the work is the sole property of the person who made. It doesn't matter if the person was paid: no contract, no work-for-hire.
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