I am about to hire a programmer to write some code for me that will help collect data for my research. It suddenly occured to me that there will be a final product here and I have no idea who would have ownership of that product. I’m not trying to complicate things, I am just wondering. My preference would be to make the program available free of charge to other researchers who could benefit from such a product. But will I have the right to do that? What kind of agreement would I have to have with the programmer up front? Is she automatically the owner of the program? If I pay for all the time she spends on creating it and the program specifics came from me would it be mine to distribute freely? I suspect some of this might depend on what kind of agreement we come to ahead of time. Could I ask her to create the program under a Creative Commons license, for example Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 1.0? I realize I can certainly ask her and she could say no, but I’m wondering if that sounds like a reasonable approach.
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