We had a long meeting with a client this week looking at some strategies for commercialising some software, including:
(a) Ensuring that the existing holding entity has all the copyright assigned to it by the developers;
(b) Ensuring that all individual developers have waived their moral rights;
(c) Incorporating a new company to hold the IP and assigning the IP to it while its value is miniscule;
(d) Issuing a small percentage of founder share, defined in such a way that they can never be diluted if other investors come on board;
(e) Having a subsidiary company to be the trading company and take all the risks and incur all the expenditure;
(f) Searching for patents that may have been applied for by competitors
(g) Looking at trade marks for the software;
(h) Drawing up a beta licence agreement for the beta-testing users
(i) Drawing up full licences for when the software is released;
(j) Looking at different ways of structuring the licensing fees.
For assistance with those structures, advice and documents, see Michael Paterson & Associates