DEED FOR DEVELOPERS

CODE YOU CAN CLAIM.

Contractor and open source contributions on record, so your code is yours or your company's, without ambiguity.

THE SITUATION

A developer's ownership story is written in commits, PRs, contractor invoices and employment agreements. Any one of them can quietly reassign work, or fail to reassign work that should have been assigned.

For solo developers, the risk is losing rights they thought were theirs. For companies, the risk is discovering during diligence that a key module was written by a contractor who never signed IP assignment.

THE RISKS

WHAT BREAKS.

01
MISSING IP ASSIGNMENT
Contractors who wrote critical code with no signed assignment to the company.
02
MOONLIGHTING CONFLICT
Side projects touched by an employer's IP clause that claims them automatically.
03
OPEN SOURCE MIXING
Copyleft licences pulled into proprietary codebases without review.
04
AI GENERATED CODE
Code produced by tools whose training data is contested, shipped with no record of provenance.
05
CLIENT REUSE
Bespoke work reused across clients with no clear licence to do so.
HOW DEED HELPS

FOUR STEPS.

01DROP

Upload the contract, the repo licence and the list of dependencies.

02EXAMINE

Deed flags assignment gaps, incompatible licences and moonlighting clauses that overreach.

03EXECUTE

Contractor assignment, side project carve outs and dual licensing done in signed form.

04DEFEND

A verifiable record when a client, an acquirer or an auditor asks who wrote what and under what terms.

QUESTIONS
+Do I own my side projects?
It depends on your employment contract. Deed reads the clause and, if needed, drafts a carve out request your employer can sign.
+How do I prove a contractor assigned their code?
A signed IP assignment stored on the Deed record. It travels with the codebase to any future investor or acquirer.
+Can I use AI generated code commercially?
Usually, with care. Deed records which tool produced what and shows which parts need a licence or a rewrite before shipping.

START A DEED.