Who really does own the menu?

Last night I saw a draft of an article that Glenn Austin (of X-Treme Chef Consulting fame) is writing for a future edition of Open House Magazine.

In his article Glenn asks the question “Who owns the menu?” and discusses the whys and wherefores of intellectual property ownership with respect to menus.  That’s not a term that he actually uses in the article, but it’s one that comes up pretty regularly in the world of software development.

Now, two things stood out to me when reading Glenn’s article.  First of all, Glenn discusses the issue from all directions, but, remarkably for him, he doesn’t have a firm opinion on the matter. A truly rare event!

Secondly, intellectual property ownership isn’t something that chefs normally discuss let alone deal with, so I thought I’d throw in my 2 cents worth.

I’ve been working in the computer software development field for about 30 years. I’ve been employed full-time as a programmer by companies, I’ve worked free-lance and I’ve worked for my own company for the last 20 years.  Ownership of my output in that time has varied depending on the employment situation.

In my earlier days I was employed by an engineering company and any engineering software that I produced was owned by that company.  Simple enough. 

At the same time, I wrote my first food costing program (at home, in my own time) and, as there was no conflict of interest with my full-time engineering job, the company (which eventually became Resort Software) owned the intellectual property to the food costing software.

Since then, I’ve done some part-time programming and that’s where things can get tricky.  Mostly the ownership resides with the person or company paying the bills. If you hire me to write a custom program for you, then you’ll own the intellectual property rights to that software, and I make that clear to the client right from the start.  If, however I use some of my own proprietary code in writing you a program, then things can get a bit messy. I can’t and won’t grant you copyright over code I wrote on my own time, but I will grant you use of that code as part of the larger program that I may be writing for you. 

Normally, and this is the most important point of this article: all of this is resolved with the client long before any software is actually written.

It's easy to see a broad analogy between the custom software situation and a chef developing a menu for an employer. The chef may use his existing work (recipes) in the menu along with entirely new recipes developed specifically for that menu. In intellectual property terms, the chef owns some of the menu and the employer owns the rest.

But, if you have a written agreement in place between the employer and employee before work commences, then none of this should be an issue.

After all that, I suggest you keep an eye out for Glenn’s article (check out Glenn's blog too, pretty much everything he writes is thought provoking and worth reading), but have a think about what he says and let him know your thoughts.