Reselling a client deliverable

[dylantucker]

Hi all -

I have a website for a client that I’ve built - it has a few features that I came up with the idea for and have built and I’m thinking I could resell it (with some changes) to other clients in the same field.

I’m wondering what people’s thoughts were on when this would be a breach of copyright/permission against the clients I originally built the site for. Does anyone know what I’s I’d need to dot and t’s I’d need to cross?

Thanks!

[zack1]

There are nuances for sure, but really it comes down to the contract/agreement you had with them. Is there a stipulation that every single bit of code you write will be handed over and completely belong to them?
Secondly, you built a “website”, not a commercial application with a specific license and copyright notice. There are only so many ways in Wordpress to use PHP to show a featured image. If this kind of code could have a copyright issue, then everybody who works on Wordpress is guilty of something.

You can think of this as the other way around. YOU wrote the code, so it belongs to YOU. But since your code is essentially “open source” or whatever, you copied it out for one of your clients. This is YOUR code and you are letting them have some of it for particular features of their website.

See that’s why it comes down to the contract. Did you write code that must be handed over to the client so that THEY own it? Or did you write code that belongs to YOU, and you are allowing it to be used on their website?

In strictly legal terms I don’t believe either of you have a leg to stand on if there is no contract about how code is handled. Since you are a web developer, it’s reasonable to assume you will build common things for clients more than one time. You can’t have only one client who wants a sidebar. One client who gets a parallax scrolling box. One client who gets a mega menu. Of course you might give multiple clients very similar, if not identical, features.

So my suggestion is that, if the client is the one who “invented” this idea, and requested you to build it for them, then in a sense it is their intellectual idea. You would be taking their idea, which is now implemented in their site, and recreating it for your own profit as a business. They would be sour over this but I’m not convinced they have any legal ground to do anything about it. Just having “ideas” doesn’t mean you legally own anything, even if a prototype is created, even if you hire someone to build it. Only a patent or a copyright or some kind of contractual agreement works for that.

On the other hand, if this was YOUR idea and you offered it to your client and created it on your own to fill a need, it really is your code, your idea, and you are allowing this client to use it.

As a general rule, if you are a freelancer, you should have your contract define this concept. That the code you write belongs to YOU, but can be freely used and tweaked by the client in their projects, and that you are free to implement the code you write, in any other project you may work on. Only if a client requires a contract in which the code you write will be handed to them as the copyright holders. In that case, you are writing code on their behalf, and it belongs to them.