Software Archives

07Sep 2021 by bhandlaw

Don’t Leave Home Without It: 6 Must-Haves for Your Startup’s Offshore Development Agreement

Many of our startup company clients look overseas for their software development needs. Hiring overseas programmers and engineering teams can allow your lean startup to reap tremendous benefits and get your site or app to market and in front of paying customers that much quicker. As with anything done in a foreign land, however, it is not without its risks. In order to remove or at least reduce these concerns, here we take a look at some essential provisions that your startup's offshore development agreement should have. No Substitute for Due Diligence No, this is not a contract provision per se but one of the most important things you and your fellow co-founders can do when seeking to hire that foreign developer has nothing to do with contract drafting. Instead,…

17Sep 2020 by bhandlaw

Don’t Ignore Acceptance Testing Language in Your Next Software Deal

Contracts, Negotiation, Software

Be honest-- as a software developer, how much time did you actually spend considering the acceptance testing language in your last development or licensing agreement? Negotiating and crafting a thorough acceptance testing clause in your agreement can be time well spent, not to mention a valuable risk management tool for your business. What is Acceptance Testing? As many of you probably know, software development, "master services", licensing and similar agreements oftentimes contain an "acceptance testing" section. Such language describes (or should anyway) a clear and mutually understood process by which the customer can verify that the software meets their business requirements. Such language can be vital to both parties where the software is costly or involves a complicated implementation by the software vendor. Below is a non-exhaustive list of issues…

17Jun 2020 by bhandlaw

Should I Register A Copyright in My Software?

Many software developers (as well as lawyers) focus entirely upon patent protection for the software code, oftentimes ignoring enormously valuable Copyright registration entirely. For reasons I outline in this post, Federal Copyright law is arguably the single most important legal protection available to you as a creator of software code. Copyrights explained (again) As I’ve written in earlier posts, a copyright in a work gives you an exclusive right to do a number of things with the work, such as copy, distribute, display, perform, or make adaptations to that work, among other rights. Copyright law says that no one else can do of these things with your work without your permission. Copyright protection is actually available for all copyrightable expression embodied in a computer program. Now notice how I said…