I'm stuck on some legal issue right now. While I understand this forum can take me only so far on the topic I must bring this issue to the community. So recently I was thinking recently about Copyright and talent that leaves a project. Expanding on that concept; What is the legal status of piece of material that has been created by someone who leaves the project, and further more what if (s)he leaves without notice. This should obviously be a big concern for most projects who have talent, but no idea of the stability of the team. Take for instance something like this. A game is nearing it's polishing stages when the programmer/artist/etc. decides to suddenly quite due to family/boredom/etc. Now the team is concerned about the project in a whole as well as how legal it is to use the programmers/artists/etc. material. So, are they forced to start from scratch, or can they use the material without any worry that the programmer will come back to haunt them? Also, how could one prevent this disaster scenario without tying anyone down? Thanks for your assistance, it is greatly appreciated.

If you're a company that hires someone, then usually this is covered under the principle of work for hire. I believe its specific to certain types of employees and contractors though. This sounds like a hobby project which probably puts this into murky waters. The best way of avoiding such a situation is to have the person working on the project to assign you the copyrights to that work, probably via a contract. This is what the Free Software Foundation does with GNU stuff.

As always, you should consult a lawyer about your specific case. If in doubt, have the contributors sign a contract or add an appropriate license to their contributed code/assets (look into BSD and Creative Commons).

Edit: My thoughts were kind-of disjointed here. If you're covered under work-for-hire, then you're golden. If not, then you need to either have the contributors put a license on their contributions that allow you to use it commercially, or have them sign some sort of contract that assigns a copyright. Which method you use depends on what your lawyer advises.

Also note that using GPL, GNU or any other publicly available license commits the code to open source and may require redistribution of source code.

As mentioned earlier, for indie projects where no one is considered an employee or where a freelance contractor is hired to program code, either a work for hire agreement, collaboration agreement or copyright assignment is needed to convey the right to use or distribute the code in connection with the project. That is the only way to ensure the team member does not come back claiming copyright infringement.

You can search for sample contracts here: http://contracts.onecle.com/

But you should consult with an attorney that specializes in IP.

Quote: Original post by Joseph Leo
Take for instance something like this.
A game is nearing it's polishing stages when the programmer/artist/etc. decides to suddenly quite due to family/boredom/etc....

This is a pretty frequent occurrence with hobby projects and the solution is to have the team sign a collaboration agreement, which either assigns ownership of the Intellectual Property they create or at least grants a non-exclusive irrevocable license to use it in the game. You can read more about collaboration agreements at http://www.underdevelopmentlaw.com/2008/11/collaboration.html

An important issue to note is that in many places a verbal agreement (which would be binding for most contracts) is not binding for an assignment of IP. It isn't enough for everyone to promise that their IP can be used and then shout "All for one and one for all", it needs to be in writing.

Thank you all very much. I have a few more questions but I will save them for a little later since I'm trying to summarize them in a more structured way but you've all been a big help to me.

Also, thank you Obscure for the link to that website. Before I ever ask any more questions I'll check over there first.