Opening

Large number of legal relations belonging to the area of Software Law is presented in a form of contracts, both written and oral. Software is quite common commercial commodity as well as common item of our everyday lives and therefore these contracts span from those most simple ones to those very complicated. It is the aim of the module to provide students with basic information regarding the most typical of these contracts.

 

Software Development Contract

 

Software development contracts include simple agreements on creating web pages as well as extremely complex contracts on development of high-cost specialised software. What all of them have in common is the fact that in time of their drafting the process of software development has not even started or is in its very initial phase. Therefore it is quite common that the process itself is regulated by the contract as well as the requirements for the software product, the rights to the product etc.

Example of application software development contract.	Example of web page development contract.

Software License Contract

 

Software License Contracts are probably the most common type of software contracts. They aim at granting certain rights exclusive to a software owner to someone else. Most commonly the right to use software as so-called end user is being granted, but any other right can be confered to someone else exclusively or non-exclusively (e. g. the right to distribute copies of the software, the right to lease copies of the software etc.).

NVIDIA software license contract.	Microsoft software license resource center.	GNU GPL 3 license contract.

Software Distribution Contract

  

Example of software distribution contract.

 

Software Maintenance Contract

 

It is very common for software developers to provide some basic level of maintenance (e. g. bug fixing, updates issuance, help desk). Some provisions concerning the issue of software maintenance may be often incorporated in a license contract, but sometimes it is necesarry to pay an extra attention to the issue, especially in case of software which functionality is very important. In these situations software maintenance service agreement may be concluded either with the developer or someone who specialises in software maintenance. 

Example of software maintenance contract.

Literature

 

Rowland, D., Campbell, A., 2002. Supply of Software: Copyright and Contract Issues. International Journal of Law and Information Technology, 10 (1), pp. 23 - 40.