Disaster Recovery Plan - Intellectual property rights 1

[trasshcan]

A company has set up a couple of servers for our charity. Do we have the intellectual property rights to the procedure they went through to set them up given that we paid for them to "install and configure" the servers. I'm thinking this would be very useful as part of a disaster recovery plan not trying to steal their knowledge.

If we wanted to use a different company to recover from a disaster then we could give the new company the plan with the setup procedures so that we could save money in terms of their time

 

[airbourne]

You may want to consult a lawyer about the terms of your contract. It will all depend on what you actually paid them to do.

This may not be a techie question, but it sure is a sticky one.

Check the plagurism laws as you cannot sell the material they gave to you unless you purchased the rights to their exact document. Again, refer back to a lawyer or have someone interpret the EXACT meaning of the contract. That will tell you what you can and cannot do.