My first conference at this fall’s ISPCON dealt with leveraging social marketing. This session, led by the always entertaining Peter Radizeski. Peter talked about how companies are encouraging their employees to blog on company blogs, and develop applications to deploy on the blog. Peter wondered aloud about who would own the employees content and applications. The basic answer is that the company does. Generally speaking, a company owns products developed by employees using corporate resources on company time.
When things get interesting is when you create a “community” in which people use your blog, or your resources to develop apps and other types of content or products. Who owns that? Does the company that hosts your blog? Do you? Does the developer? Unless you’d like to invite the courts to figure this out, the answer is it will depend on your contract. Without a contract, it’s likely that ownership will be, at best, shared, at worst, for you, owned completely by the developer. So unless you’re simply trying to create a community (which, I agree with Isabel, is a good thing), you need to create a contract that defines who owns what.
About David Snead
David Snead is a lawyer whose practice is focused on internet infrastructure providers. In his eleven years in this practice, he has represented clients including multinationals, middle tier hosting companies, and two guys, a server, a T-1 and a huge MasterCard balance.
A long-time WHIR contributor, David Snead is the Web hosting business's best-known legal expert. Through his WHIR blog, he offers a credible legal perspective on both specific actions in the Web hosting business and general developments in legislation.
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