Copyright

Hi All,

The company I work for has been awarded a large automation project, almost exact replica of a running system in the same plant. The customer insists that we borrow the code from the previous system engineered by competitor. From the obvious reasons we do not want to do it, but have hard time persuading the customer to leave us engineer the system our way.

Since I will be in the first line of defence (at least at the beginning), I would appreciate if you could help me "build my case".

Thanks.

If you ever want to persuade someone into or out of, anything that you do not want to do....talk money, tell them that they will have to pay for the code from the other firm, but yours comes for free with the project

1) You imply, but don't really state, that the existing program is marked Copyright by the competitor. If that is the case, you don't have a choice - it is intellectual property of the competitor. You can't copy it without exposing your company to legal action by the competitor.

2) If the program isn't identified as copyrighted by the competitor, you could theoretically copy and adapt it. However, you may still unwittingly expose your company to action by the competitor.

If case 2 applies, you should insist that the customer provide you with a letter from an officer of the customer's company that does three things:

a) states that the existing program is the property of the customer, and they have the right to re-use and modify at will
b) indimnifies your company from any legal action or damages obtained by the competitor, including the agreement that they will pay all legal expenses associated with defense from action by the competitor
c) agrees to pay any costs, at a fixed hourly rate, associated with required modifications of the existing program that might be reqired to adapt it to your system

That should give the customer something to chew on.

geniusintraining, Tom - thanks for the valuable input!