Legal Question in Intellectual Property in California

Robert,

There are several avenues to protect your client's online application.

1) Functionality

If your client's application has a novel and non-obvious functionality that has not been done before, you may be able to pursue a patent to protect the functional aspects of the application.

There are several hurdles that must be overcome in order to obtain a patent on a software application, so you will want to discuss the matter with a registered patent attorney to get a better idea of what the process entails.

2) The code itself

The software code may be copyrighted by registering your code with the US Copyright Office ( www.copyright.gov ).

Copyrighting your code makes it so that if someone steals all or a portion of your code, you may bring a copyright infringement action against them seeking both damages and a court order requiring them to stop the infringement.

Kind regards,

James Michael Smedley, Esq.

Managing Member

The Sigma Law Group LLC

Software has the potential for dual protection - patent and copyright. In this respect, it is pretty much unique in intellectual property. By all means, copyright the code, and also have a patent attorney review the potential for a patent.

Some practitioners like the idea of copyrighting only a portion of the software, omitting some of the key portions of code to keep it secret. Whatever is copyrighted is, on the one hand, protected by law, and on the other hand, made entirely public. Others feel this just invites reverse engineering and work-around.

The short answer is that your client can protect any new coding/material he contributes, but would not be able to own any rights in the underlying asp software (which is owned by Microsoft). Obviously, though, the only part he would need/want to protect is his own contribution.