I run a software development house and we used to get into this kind of sticky situation from the other end a few times many years ago, until we explicitly stated in all proposals who would own the end product, whether it was a license etc etc.
The default years ago used to be that if the ownership question was not addressed it would belong to the development house. Nowadays it's not so clear, and can go either way in court. You pays your money and takes your chance.
My $0.02-worth is this - I think it's unreasonable for customers to expect to automatically get the copyright of what is developed. Bear in mind that if copyright is truly transferred, the developers will have designed a profitable, saleable application using their many years of experience, and they are then expected to give all rights to any future revenue from that application of expertise to you. Also, if the letter of the law is followed, they are never again to design or build a similar application that works in the same way! Nor can they re-use any of their developed code/modules/snippets that they implemented in your system.
And what if they used other bits from other systems to build your program? Most development houses do that, it's like re-inventing the wheel otherwise! If they grant you the copyright to the system, well then technically their other clients ought to now pay you license fees - a preposterous proposition.
Think of a professional photographer. You ask him/her to come take photos at your wedding. You pay a large amount (if he's any good!) of money to have him there on the day, then he goes away and comes back with a huge array of photographs. You then buy an album of your favourites, having already paid for his time. Can you now go and copy these as many times as you like? Do you automatically get all of the photos he took because you paid for his time? Of course not! He still owns the copyright. You want another album? You have to buy another from him! We wouldn't expect any less.
In my opinion we hugely undervalue intellectual property in the IT arena. Your software partner has invested literally years and years of time in building a standard code base to get to the point of being able to develop a competent system for you at an appropriate cost. You have an unlimited license to use it (and hopefully modify it - I agree with an earlier post that they are likely to agree to that) - but by having paid for developers time spent on it, does that automatically give you a right to its copyright, all potential future revenue from it, and all use of any code contained within it? I think not!
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I run a software development house and we used to get into this kind of sticky situation from the other end a few times many years ago, until we explicitly stated in all proposals who would own the end product, whether it was a license etc etc.
The default years ago used to be that if the ownership question was not addressed it would belong to the development house. Nowadays it's not so clear, and can go either way in court. You pays your money and takes your chance.
My $0.02-worth is this - I think it's unreasonable for customers to expect to automatically get the copyright of what is developed. Bear in mind that if copyright is truly transferred, the developers will have designed a profitable, saleable application using their many years of experience, and they are then expected to give all rights to any future revenue from that application of expertise to you. Also, if the letter of the law is followed, they are never again to design or build a similar application that works in the same way! Nor can they re-use any of their developed code/modules/snippets that they implemented in your system.
And what if they used other bits from other systems to build your program? Most development houses do that, it's like re-inventing the wheel otherwise! If they grant you the copyright to the system, well then technically their other clients ought to now pay you license fees - a preposterous proposition.
Think of a professional photographer. You ask him/her to come take photos at your wedding. You pay a large amount (if he's any good!) of money to have him there on the day, then he goes away and comes back with a huge array of photographs. You then buy an album of your favourites, having already paid for his time. Can you now go and copy these as many times as you like? Do you automatically get all of the photos he took because you paid for his time? Of course not! He still owns the copyright. You want another album? You have to buy another from him! We wouldn't expect any less.
In my opinion we hugely undervalue intellectual property in the IT arena. Your software partner has invested literally years and years of time in building a standard code base to get to the point of being able to develop a competent system for you at an appropriate cost. You have an unlimited license to use it (and hopefully modify it - I agree with an earlier post that they are likely to agree to that) - but by having paid for developers time spent on it, does that automatically give you a right to its copyright, all potential future revenue from it, and all use of any code contained within it? I think not!