Intellectual property

Please describe your policy on intellectual property (IP) in relation to your customers' creative ideas. How do you protect their IP? Are you happy to sign a non-disclosure agreement? We will need the contract to be "work for hire" where we retain full intellectual property and copyright in all work done on the project.

We do work under NDA. We protect IP through NDAs with all employees and would aggressively support prosecution of any employees violating client IP protected under an NDA with East Agile.   We understand IP, including many of the subtle complexities. 

We have internally developed code and libraries that we can grant clients a non-exclusive, transferrable right to use.  Or we can re-invent those wheels using developers with no knowledge of our pre-existing solutions.  

We do grant exclusive rights to original code we develop for clients. However, we do retain the rights to general knowledge and general know-how. For example, if we originally implement Twitter oauth for one client, we retain the right to implement it for other clients, from scratch, even though the final implementation may be very similar. However, unique inventions, solutions or methods remain the exclusive property of clients. When other clients face similar problems, we develop novel, and hopefully better solutions for them, or we ask the client technical staff to propose a solution, or we bring in a developer without proprietary knowledge of the solution.

With permission from clients, we can also work with open source code, identified as such, and located in external libraries for segregation from non-open source code.