Intellectual Property (IP)

Anything funded by The Catalyst and National Lottery Community Fund Digital Response that creates copyright in any software shall be made available for third party use in accordance with an appropriate Open License (such as the Common Clause or GNU licenses). Any rights relating to materials produced will also be made available for use in accordance with the Creative Commons Attribution Licence 4.0.

CAST will own the Intellectual Property Rights in all reports, materials, documents and other products produced as part of any service delivery contract in order to publish the materials openly, in line with the above description.

CAST has an obligation to our funders to protect any intellectual property rights purchased or developed using the grant funding and we and our subcontractors cannot commercially exploit or dispose of these rights without their prior written consent.

Our funders may freely share any information, know-how, systems or processes developed as part of the service delivery contract to support similar projects.

You do not have any right to use our funders’ (e.g. The National Lottery Community Fund) name, logo or trademarks on any of your products or services.

Scenario 1: Where there is new IP generated

If any funding is awarded to develop new software or solutions, then the IP will be owned by CAST and licensed under a Creative Commons licence (share-alike/non-commercial) for non-software IP. For software IP, the licence will be an open source license as described above.

Scenario 2: Where there is pre-existing IP to be developed further that can be decoupled from the original product/software

If there is a situation where a product has already been developed, and CAST is funding a new ‘plugin’ (e.g. Wordpress plugin), then the IP would be owned by CAST and shared under an open source licence.

Scenario 3: Where there is pre-existing IP to be developed further that cannot be decoupled from the original product/software

If a software product is to be developed further and IP cannot be decoupled from the original source code, then the IP developed with CAST funding would sit with CAST as a non-exclusive, non-transferable licence and shared under an open source license as described above.

Scenario 4: Where there is pre-existing IP which is not changed using the CAST funding.

The ownership of this IP will remain with the organisation who owned it at the commencement of the programme.