Contracts for Engineers

"Preface Engineers encounter various forms of contracts at nearly every turn in their careers. It is not the purpose of this book to make engineers independent of legal advice, but it is designed to help them avoid the most fundamental pitfalls. One does not need to take a lawyer on every motor trip to tell him what the speed limits are! A major goal of this book is to enhance an engineer's ability to communicate contractual issues to a lawyer and to help the engineer to better understand the lawyer's advice. The plan of this book is to leverage the concepts of contracts to introduce the reader to other subjects such as intellectual property (including patents, copyrights, trademarks and trade secrets). Also included under the contract concept are standards (including standards bodies, standards development, conformity assessment and accreditation) as well as ethics, at both the micro and macro levels. Chapter 1 briefly introduces common law contracts and includes some simple examples of their underlying principles. Chapter 2 includes a fragment of a sample of the Uniform Commercial Code (UCC) relating to the sales of goods. Chapter 3 surveys the elements of several distinct kinds of contracts that are frequently encountered by engineers, including employee agreements (and related consulting agreements), construction contracts, and government contracts. Chapter 4 provides an overview of intellectual property from a contract perspective and focuses on the different kinds of patents, describing the roles they play in commerce. Chapter 5 provides a brief introduction to the process of obtaining patents, including the rationale for inventing in that process. Chapter 6 reviews copyright as a form of contract and touches on recent developments in that area"--