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I'm wondering on what's the practice of writing in the copyright area to use for the company I work for.

Earlier I was working solo but now we have hired more developers. Company is not so much concerned about the copyright stuff since they deliver products only but I want to enforce some kind of protection for the company's source code, so what should I configure in IDE's for developers working on the code?

user3610227
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    I don't understand what you are asking. – Robert Harvey Jun 14 '15 at 01:04
  • to make it short what to write in the copyright area, any template that I can configure in the IDE's of the developers. It's a closed source, not MIT or CC license etc. – user3610227 Jun 14 '15 at 02:29
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    This is a legal question. Ask your lawyer. – Basile Starynkevitch Jun 14 '15 at 05:39
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    As Basile alluded to, you company either has an internal legal department or a lawyer on retainer. Contact them. If it's a small company and they don't wish to spend the money on the lawyer for this, just don't worry about it. It's their problem not yours. Although, it's not really that big of a problem, as they own the code whether there's a license header or not. A simple "Property of Acme Code Co." would probably do nicely, but then again, I'm not a lawyer. – RubberDuck Jun 14 '15 at 05:57

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If you are writing the code on behalf of some company, then nine times out of ten, the copyright on the code is owned by the company and not by the individuals writing the code.

For that reason, the copyright statement should most likely be:

Copyright (C) 2015, Company name
All rights reserved.

Some companies might want a more elaborate statement of what is allowed and what isn't. Such statements should be drafted in cooperation with the legal department or company lawyer.

Bart van Ingen Schenau
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  • You don't need a copyright statement. All code that hasn't been put in the public domain by an explicit decision of the copyright holder is under copyright protection. Nobody except the copyright holder is allowed to copy it, and claiming "but there was no copyright notice so I thought..." won't help the copyright owner. That said, if there is a copyright notice, then it must be true. Which means 90% of the time the company must be in a copyright notice if it is there. You can add "written by..." followed by the truthful name of the author. – gnasher729 Jun 14 '15 at 21:25