Copyrighting an Excel based tool

[deckster]

I think people (including, I suspect, the OP) are getting confused between copyright and patent.

Copyright, as has been said, is automatic. Anything you write is yours, and nobody can sell it or give it away without your say-so. This permission may have (almost certainly will have, in fact) been given when you signed your contract with the client. What copyright doesn't prevent is somebody else writing something to do the same job and selling it.

Patent is entirely different and needs to show originality. It's also very difficult and expensive to obtain, but once you've got your patent nobody else is allowed to reproduce the same work, even if the work is done entirely separately and without any reference to your patent.

[DaveB]

I think people (including, I suspect, the OP) are getting confused between copyright and patent.

Copyright, as has been said, is automatic. Anything you write is yours, and nobody can sell it or give it away without your say-so. This permission may have (almost certainly will have, in fact) been given when you signed your contract with the client. What copyright doesn't prevent is somebody else writing something to do the same job and selling it.

Patent is entirely different and needs to show originality. It's also very difficult and expensive to obtain, but once you've got your patent nobody else is allowed to reproduce the same work, even if the work is done entirely separately and without any reference to your patent.

Definitely Copyright I'm after, not Patent.

It's an auditing tool. Client answers specific questions about the state of their system(s) based on a standard approch. The tool scores them, reports on compliance levels and highlights areas of risk in a nice, simple, senior management friendly way.

I wrote it to take the legwork out of doing audits for clients. I'm happy to give them a copy as part of the package when they engage me, what I dont want is for it to then be distributed willy nilly once I've gone.

Nothing original about what it does or how it does it, but I have put a lot of work into setting it up to be quick and easy to use and creating the questions and scoring criteria.

[TheFaQQer]

Definitely Copyright I'm after, not Patent.

It's an auditing tool. Client answers specific questions about the state of their system(s) based on a standard approch. The tool scores them, reports on compliance levels and highlights areas of risk in a nice, simple, senior management friendly way.

I wrote it to take the legwork out of doing audits for clients. I'm happy to give them a copy as part of the package when they engage me, what I dont want is for it to then be distributed willy nilly once I've gone.

Nothing original about what it does or how it does it, but I have put a lot of work into setting it up to be quick and easy to use and creating the questions and scoring criteria.

Copyright is no problem - you've got it when you created it.

If you are providing a copy to the client, then make sure that you have a well-worded EULA in place, which clearly states what they can and can't do with it.

If you can, stick something in the code which says which client it was delivered to as well - so if it turns up anywhere else, then you know where it came from.

[NotAllThere]

I'd get a programmer to take what you've done and encapsulate it in some way into a standalone program.