Terrible but fascinating: this is Rook's old team from Eggcite. I used to eat lunch with these dudes every day, talking trash. They were like a bunch of high school boys, sort of annoying and charming and slackery. Actually I can't think of M.T., a rather sweet slackery alterna-nerd turned manager, without picturing the periods when he would sit in his cube for days, listlessly playing this one web-based balloon-popping game that seemed to be a variant of "Pong". Or, complaining about his frustrated creative life as an actor.
Anyway, I'm sorry this has come down on their lives. It seems like if they'd done it on purpose, they would have been smarter and sneakier about it.
I took my own code from Eggcite, not to sell it to anyone, but so I could remember what I did, and besides... they were bankrupt anyway and had bounced my paycheck and not paid out my benefits. I had it in binders anyway, because it used to help me see how all the different modules and things interrelated. And then I'm sure I just had the whole wad of code at home anyway or on one of my personal accounts so that I could work on it from home. And, if Gogol's engine had hired me I would have referred to it to duplicate the function, surely (though not just plain used it: for one thing, it wouldn't have been that hard to recreate - for another it was not so neatly done as to be that portable - I had inherited most of it from someone else.) It's easy to be sloppy about that stuff and not think about the boundaries.
I find this whole trend around tracking IP through employees really creepy. And, not to sound naïve, but it strikes me as an obnoxious reversal of the way we buy data from them; if I buy a DVD from a corporation for $20, all I get is an extremely limited license to hold one copy of the data. If they pay me $20 for an hour of my time, they claim an unlimited license over everything I thought during that time period; they can copy it as many times as they want, alter it in any way they want and control (or attempt to control) my right to express that thought again.
It has occasionally occurred to me that if I worked someplace with a keystroke monitor they could, at some point in the future, lay claim to about 3/4 of the content of my blog as intellectual property generated on their time with their equipment.
That just makes me wanna sock someone.
Posted by: Joshua | February 28, 2006 at 08:58 PM
Actually - I'm all for protecting employee rights (as a fellow who makes a lot of IP). But a couple of comments:
* These folks deserve to get reamed. I've never worked anywhere where it was acceptable to use code from a former employer.
* If I used my employer's computer and time to update my blog, then yes - they are right to claim ownership of said blog. Because they paid for it.
For my personal IP I'm careful to use my own machine and time - it's only fair. However, the few times I'm encountered employers who wanted to claim my IP for non work time creations - I was quick to make sure they backed-off.
Posted by: Severin | March 01, 2006 at 10:20 AM
I don't agree about the blog at all. If I get a phone call during work time, then my company doesn't own the rights to that and can't, say, publish it or broadcast it somewhere. A blog is no different.
On the other hand, I agree that stuff which I am hired to create for a company belongs to them. If they pay me to develop a program, and I sign an employment contract which specifies that, then I can't go using the program elsewhere. (My *ideas* are my own, unless there is a specific patent for the idea. Copyright doesn't give allow anyone to have ownership of ideas or methods.)
Posted by: Rook | March 01, 2006 at 12:03 PM