Software & Technology Licensing

Practice Overview

Knowing Your Business and the Transaction.
Your company can greatly benefit from a firm that understands your business needs and can adapt a software license to effectively address your most important concerns. Our approach to software licensing focuses on understanding the business deal and making sure that the licensing agreement addresses your need for results and appropriately protects you from risks and liabilities. For the company acquiring software programs, that often means adapting an agreement to broaden the scope of use, to focus on mission critical functions, to provide appropriate service levels, to protect confidentiality, or to follow your business policies. For the software provider, that often means adapting the agreement to protect your IP investment and to reduce exposure to unknown liabilities and open-ended commitments.

Keeping You Up-To-Date With the Software Industry.
By keeping current and anticipating trends and changes in the law, your company can make sure that licensing transactions help your bottom-line. Our software licensing attorneys spend hours keeping up-to-date on issues that affect software licensing transactions and make that knowledge and information available to you. We believe you will find that transactions assisted by our software licensing team run smoothly and efficiently. Because we negotiate software transactions on a daily basis, we know where the industry standard tends to be on issues such as risk allocation and IP protection. We keep current on new technologies and issues such as open source code, patent trolling for license fees, increasing use of the application service model and technology outsourcing.

Knowing the Players.
Because we have represented major publicly traded companies in the acquisition of broad portfolios of software, we know the negotiation styles of hundreds of software and technology companies. We also work daily with many smaller software developers.

Scope of Service

Typical Transactions and Agreements Include:

• Global Master Software Development and Licensing Agreements
• Application Service Provider Agreements
• Software Escrow Agreements
• Software Reseller Agreements
• Evaluation Licenses
• Domestic and International Software Marketing Rights Agreements
• Data Access Agreements
• Beta Test Agreements
• Software Copyrights and Patents

Of Note

Tim Feathers and Steve Cosentino blog on technology related topics including new developments in software licensing. See our blog's discussion of new software licensing models.