Code copyright

I have a freelance contract to develope an app for a company. The program is for a printing company but the billing will be going through 2 other companies, including a company I used to work for.

This company will be writing the cheques to me and will be passing the bill on to the other companies. So far so good. My question is about the copyright to the software I'm writing.

The code will have some proprietary info that I learned from my previous employer. So I don't have a problem with a non-disclosure agreement with them on that part of the technology. I also don't mind them having the copyright to that section. My problem is that they want the copyright to the whole thing. From their point of view, they don't want to have to come to me to make minor changes, which I understand, but I also don't want to have to go to them if I wish to use the non-proprietary code in other apps.

Is there a way to give BOTH of us a copyright? Perhaps give them the copyright and myself an unlimited licence to use/modify it perhaps?

I would suggest the unlimited license. Anything else would probably
require setting up some kind of partnership in order to hold joint ownership

You could place the code that you wish for them not to be able to copyright in its own .dll.
Then copyright the .dll and the application itself differently.
Copyrighted material can be used inside other copyrighted material, an example being the software that Internet Explorer licenses from the Independent JPEG Group.
While Microsoft holds the rights to IE they have no rights as soon as the application utilizes code written by the Independent JPEG Group.
In cases such as this the biggest problem is defining the line at which who owns what, and by using a .dll that line is about 100 feet thick, and painted neon.

Good Luck
-cl

The reply by Crazed-Lunatic is amazing. Each new client that I start a project for asks for "exclusivity" and "non-diclosure". I never have a problem with the latter, but when it comes to exclusivity, it is a fine line.
Anyway, most clients want such customization with bells and whistles that I can re-use a lot of my code but most of it is from scratch.

"The reply by Crazed-Lunatic is amazing."

Do I detect a hint of sarcasm? Why may I ask?

Regards,
-cl

No sarcasm at all. I really like the idea of creating the DLLs, because it would in a way give you ownership .

Stupid sarcasm detector... always returning false output.

Regards,
-cl

If you are keeping your code in an ActiveX dll, you should always compile said DLL on your home machine if possible. This is because part of the GUIID that is used to identify the ActiveX dll is derived from the PC's lan card so a particularily nasty lawyer could probably argue that this being such an intrinsic part of the dll gives the client some extra rights thereto.

HTH,
Duncan