I assigned copyright to a client, can I develop a new similar app?

microISV How-To's

A software developer’s question arrived:

I assigned copyright to a client for an mobile app, can I develop a new similar app to sell?

That question comes down to what’s in your original agreement, and in particular whether (and how) ‘derivative works’ were included or excluded. You might want a lawyer to look it over.

Here’s my non-lawyer view: In the most restrictive case, where you sold everything as a “work for hire” and agreed not to create derivative works, you still have the right to create a new similar app to sell, but only if you use none of the code and images and development work used for the original app. Start entirely from scratch. That’s basically how the Compaq computer was created as a clone for the IBM PC, but Compaq took an extra step: One team created a set of requirements for a clone of the IBM BIOS software, and another team, with no overlap, wrote the new BIOS.

Put another way, if i write an article for a magazine (remember those?), on any given topic, and I’m paid for it, I can still write another article on a similar topic for some other magazine, and get paid for it. And I’ve done exactly that. The results changed dramatically because the audience changed, but the initial topic was the same. Your knowledge gained during the first project is yours. You’ve only sold the product of that knowledge.

Jerry Stern
Chief Technology Officer, PC410.com

Incrementalitis: The Un-Upgrade

Definitions

Sign: New and Improved TechnologySometimes a new edition of a product works well for all the features of the previous version, but for the newly-added ‘reasons to upgrade’, well, they’re just not ready. Windows has had a long set of new features that didn’t work, but were heavily promoted. Windows 7 has clumsy support for touch screens, but that feature works well in Windows 10.

Windows 95 had no Internet support until you also bought the Win 95 Plus! add-on, and that gave you Internet Explorer version 1.0, based on the old NCSA Mosaic software from the National Center for Supercomputing Applications at the University of Illinois. Now, the internet in Windows generally works without any setup whatsoever.

And going all the way back to 1993, in Windows for Workgroups 3.11, we had “network support”, which worked if you fiddled with the settings long enough for the other computers to declare Bingo! and accept the connection. Networking has become better in subsequent Windows, and now, it works if you don’t mix product ages too dramatically.

While yet-another faster version of what we’re using is generally a safe purchase, it pays to check reviews on new technology. And new tech should come from old names. If the latest, greatest technology is from a good company with a history of good products, I know they’ll get it right at some point. But if it’s a no-name security camera from an Amazon Marketplace vendor shipping directly from the Hong Kong post office, it’s trouble. Such vendors may be OK for a cheap cell phone case, but not for anything that’s complex or new.

When is Technology Too New?

Newsletter Reprints

A reprint from the PC410 Security Newsletter:

RobotTech at PC410.com

Don’t be somebody else’s guinea pig. There’s a reason that the latest and greatest widget is called the leading edge, or sometimes the bleeding edge of technology. If it still has rough corners, somebody’s gonna bleed. New technology isn’t particularly polished, compatible, or cheap. So configuration costs are high, and there can be a longer-than-normal list of “While we’re doing this, we really should upgrade that.” items.

The Amazon Echo and Google Home devices live in your home and can do things for you, like playing music, or ordering, well, dollhouses. A San Diego TV station said these magic words on television in a news report:”Alexa order me a dollhouse”, and multiple Amazon Echo boxes heard that broadcast and obeyed, by ordering a dollhouse.

And then there was the Google advertisement for Google Home during the Superbowl. Early adopters of the new Google gadget found that when the television said the “OK Google” trigger phrase, their Gooogle Home device woke up. Fortunately, it was not dollhouse-enabled, and didn’t place any dollhouse orders.

Any science-fiction reader knows that voice-controlled whole-house computers are on the way, that they will use voice recognition to only allow commands from a specific individual, and have a special command to say ‘Make it so’. In Robert Heinlein’s books, commands had to end with “I tell you three times.” Clearly, we haven’t reached the competence level of science fiction from 1980.

The Internet of (Stupid) Things

There are a lot of cheap security cameras and so-called ‘smart’ light bulbs available now. Theses devices ‘connect to your cell phone’ and let you control them. Warning flag there–they connect to the internet in order to trade information with a central server, and accept outside instructions to control them, relayed from your cell phone, and possibly any other system that knows the sometimes-obvious default password, which is generally ‘1234′.

In the past year, there have been incidents like these:

  • The largest web site attacks ever seen were accomplished by taking over security camera video recorders (network DVRs), telling millions of them to attack a single site and take it down. As over 80 brands of security DVRs are made by just one company in China, and they share the same settings, and passwords like “123456”, they’re trivial to find online and then turn into attack ‘bots.
  • Some purchasers of video baby monitors were surprised to find that their baby monitors showed someone else’s nursery. There were some basic security flaws that didn’t account for two monitors on one account, or monitors returned as unwanted needing to be reset to factory defaults.

For many of these products, there is no way to contact the purchasers with a fix, and no way for purchasers to contact the manufacturer; a no-name product means no updates, no notices of security issues, and no fixes.

Jerry Stern
Chief Technology Officer, PC410.com