ACQUIRING AND ENFORCING THE GOVERNMENT’S RIGHTS IN TECHNICAL DATA AND COMPUTER SOFTWARE UNDER DEPARTMENT OF DEFENSE CONTRACTS: A PRACTICAL HANDBOOK FOR ACQUISITION PROFESSIONALS - 5TH EDITION (OCT-2012)

ACQUIRING AND ENFORCING THE GOVERNMENT’S RIGHTS IN TECHNICAL DATA AND COMPUTER SOFTWARE UNDER DEPARTMENT OF DEFENSE CONTRACTS: A PRACTICAL HANDBOOK FOR ACQUISITION PROFESSIONALS - 5TH EDITION (OCT-2012)., This handbook provides a practical “cradle-to-grave” approach to acquiring technical data and computer software rights. It is an extended treatment of that subject which is briefly discussed in Government Contract Law for Engineers (September 2004) issued by SMC/JA. The acquisition of rights in technical data and computer software under DoD contracts applies equally to supply contracts, services contracts and construction contracts. Accordingly, Appendix 1 contains excerpts from a request for proposals (RFP) for a services acquisition, Appendix 2 contains excerpts from an RFP for a software-intensive system, and Appendix 3 contains excerpts from an RFP for a hardware-intensive system. Various program offices carefully tailored those excerpts for each acquisition using the disciplined intellectual framework described in this handbook to account for the specific needs of their particular acquisition. Due to the size of the appendices to this handbook, this office has highlighted relevant portions of those appendices in yellow in the soft copy so readers can quickly find those excerpts. Readers may wish to print out a hard copy of this handbook using a color copier and insert that copy into a three-ring binder, as that approach will facilitate the reader‟s ability to find a relevant portion in an appendix the rationale for which this handbook discusses in the narrative portion. Each acquisition has its own unique needs for rights in technical data and computer software. Unfortunately, a one-size-fits-all-panacea-clause does not exist. If it did, the drafters of the Defense Federal Acquisition Regulation Supplement (DFARS) would have included such a clause into that acquisition regulation the last time (i.e., June 28, 1995) they issued a complete rewrite of the regulations applicable to this topic – or the last time they proposed another complete rewrite of those regulations (i.e., September 27, 2010). It would therefore be inadvisable for the reader to conclude that all that is necessary is to select one of the examples included in Appendices 1, 2 or 3 and copy it over into their RFP.