In music, you can have copyright for a composition (like, lyrics and sheet music), and then for a master record. If you sell a copy of a song, you generally have pay royalties to both copyright holders.

So, in your example, the specifiers would own the specification, the programmers the C code, and machine encoders own the machine code.

But the ownership wouldn't be complete. If you sell the machine code, you'd have to pay royalties to all three. If you only sold the C code, only to the specifiers and the programmers.