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Adam Hinkley's IP Hindsights
spam-it-to-me-baby writes: "Adam Hinkley started out as a bright 17-year-old Australian software hack with a good idea. Now he's 22, broke, and has lost all his intellectual property after being crushed by the multinational software company that first took him into its folds and then dragged him through the courts in an at-times bitter and protracted battle. He has a few words of warning for any other young mind thinking of starting off down the same path." Sobering, but it looks like Adam has been able to shrug off the ruling with admirable ease. Learn from what he says.
I know what you are saying but I don't think it is completely so. A person who has had significant wealth, for whatever reason, will be at an advantage over someone who has never had wealth. This may only be because of social connections but it is an important advantage the poor man does not have.
I have some friends whose parents are fairly well off (a million isn't what it used to be!). Naturally, I also have some friends whose parents aren't as well off. I have observed that the well-off discuss the generation of wealth in practical, almost mechanical, terms. The less well-off talk about "hitting the jackpot" or "lucking out".
To leap to a conclusion: the wealthy think about money as the outcome of executing a plan while the poor think about money as something that just happens to you. Children absorb these ideas from their parents and their financial lives are the result.
as close to a gaurantee as you'll come is to speak to a legal professional regarding exactly these points. When I started a new job, I made it clear in my interviews that I would be working on personal projects and that I would retain full ownership of them. I got a clause written by a team of IP specialists and had my employer sign it.
:)
Each engagement may have unique issues so you can't have some blanket agreement that encompasses every employment situation. You'll at least have to have the clause reviewed when you change jobs.
Total cost: $300. That's less than some video cards
What is your "unique perspective"? How did Hotline Communications misbehave?
Maggard posted in another thread:
Do you have something new to add or you just another "'cause I was told so" syncophant?
I don't read ACs: If a post isn't worth so much as a nom de plume to its author then I wont bother either.
I couldn't have said it better.
There are lessons to be learned from this case, but they are not the ones being promoted by many of the other comments, or the tone of the article ("businesses suck, they always try to screw the little guy", etc..)
The lesson here is simple: don't steal. Adam Hinks stole the property that these businesses rightfully paid for, and has been found guilty of such in a court of law.
Him making these apparently honest businesspeople out to be 'con artists' in his little rant is totally unfair. Adam Hinks is the con-artist.
And he was caught. Good.
In the future, I'm sure he will be much more careful about the contracts he should sign (as we all should be), as well as what he does when the deal 'sours'.
[This is an honest opinion, and well-justified by the facts of the case. It's not flamebait.]
just to partially rebut Adam Hinkley being compos mentis, the devastating personal event was his sister being kidnapped and then killed.
r e2.html
Quote from Salon: "His younger sister had been kidnapped and murdered just a few months before he signed the shareholder agreements. Hinks was, his lawyers have alleged in court, put into a situation that was almost abusive: They describe him as a young boy, far from home, forced to put in grueling hours and pressured into signing a shareholder agreement that he didn't understand. They have also argued that an oral agreement gave Adam Hinkley independent ownership of the AppWarrior code." http://www.salon.com/21st/feature/1999/02/25featu
It's pretty hard to find any of the other stories dealing with this time period in more depth. But I remember other stories talking about semi-questionable tactics by Hotline to get what they wanted.
USA-Democracy is 270 million YESes and NOes a day, not one every four years.
As usual, the advice not to write software when employed by someone else is both correct and incorrect.
It's correct in that anything You write may belong to the employer. Incorrect in that it might not belong to the employer.
Correct answer would be to get it written from the employer, either in employment contract or (actually preferable even if mentioned in contract) for each project.
In my contract there is a specific mention regarding working for other parties. And, for each project, I get an agreement from my boss.
This, however, covers only working, not writing software for any other purpose.
Of course the legalese differs from country to country, but I try to get agreement for whatever I decide to do that might coincide with my employers business. For me it's pretty easy, because we've agreed what's mine and what's theirs, in general terms, and thus specifics are easy to handle.
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It's understandable, because if you are used to tabulating your work product at (say) $10/hour, $10,000,000 sounds like an uncountable amount of money that will put you in mansions and mercedes for the rest of your life. However, when you boil that down to a yearly payment minus taxes, it really is just a quite average honda-drimiddle-class lifestyle, assuming you quit your job.
Not to mention the scammers that come out of the woodwork and attack these people (who since they were playing the lotto, probably weren't the brightest bulbs to begin with). After they get into debt, they are often forced to sell the remaining prize money at pennies on the dollar to someone.
California switched to a pay-up-front system (where you get less money), and most winners take it. It's supposedly been pretty successful at preventing the total bankrupcy explosion that most lottery winners face.
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Business. Numbers. Money. People. Computer World.
Not to mention that hotline ops have had their ass dragged in for copyright infringement. That's more than can be said for individual Napster or Gnutella users.
(The biggest 'media' app hotline site for example, there was a slashdot article on it, but the search function here sucks).
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Business. Numbers. Money. People. Computer World.
I have... for a few years during college. There is alot more time for thought. You typically work a shift a day (lunch or dinner) and occasionally a double shift. (Weekends).
Shift consist of setup (15-45mins), waiting, and cleanup. For instance, a lunch shift. You get there at 10:45. Setup for 11:00 lunch, and get off work at about 3:00-4:00.
So, you work from 10:45 - 4:00. You miss most of the road traffic. You get the whole rest of the time off.
I'd say that, other than the pay, it's a great job if time is what you want most.
Pan
I said no... but I missed and it came out yes.
I recommend working at a car wash - there's absolutely no thought involved in the work (well, unless you're learning to drive a manual transmission on the customers' cars :) and you can get really buff (for most readers, this will be the most buff you'll ever be).
Of course, most of your deep thoughts involve how you'll never trash your car as much as the customers have, but you could probably think about other stuff too.
Your right to not believe: Americans United for Separation of Church and
Or, "How do you make a small fortune racing automobiles?" "Start with a large fortune."
Why yes, I AM a rocket scientist!
You must be confused. Were you not here during the election when everyone ignorned Harry Browne and all decided to vote for Nader?
No, there are no libertarians here... Just people that hate corperations more than anything (including the government).
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Oh poor old would-be-capitalist. Only 22 and already he's bereft of all his precious intellectual property.
Let this be a lesson to the rest of you: GPL it and this won't happen.
So the situation looks pretty simple: make sure that they're not the ones who hold all the cards. Don't go in pleading "please suh, could I have this job". Have an attitude. They may not hire you, but you'll leave the interview remembering that you didn't want to work there anyway.
(this strategy requires obviously that you have a couple of months' rent and food worth of money in your bank account and that you compensate for surprises.)
Of course, you'll have to remember that ninety percent of everything is crud. That includes the people, so 90% of everyone are foolish.
Not really. Companies usually have some form of claim to inventions, but straight copyright work is fairly safe. If you have a special contract saying otherwise, Id suggest you charge overtime for every single line of code you ever write.
The issue is, are they paying you to do something? If they are, it's theirs. If they arent, they have no claim. It usually hard to claim that an invention related to your job was not thought out or inspired during work. But those 25000 lines of code at home are another matter.
You want me to startup a company with you; and you want me to allow you, whenever you feel like it, to walk away with the IP used to start the company and expect me to NOT sue?
Get Real.
If he had done this because they wouldn't let him put banner ads in NOBODY on Slashdot would be agreeing with him.
If he wanted to control it he should have made sure he had controlling interest in the company at all times.
what happened with his sister? did they ever find her?
use LaTeX? want an online reference manager that
-- john
its very simple. release as GPL and assign copyright to the FSF and you jointly (or only FSF if really paranoid). release anonymously. although that might not bring the satisfaction of seeing your name in highlights, the fact is that i (and i assume other) GPL coders do it for fun anyway and it really doesnt matter in the end. a simple (C) 2001 Free Software Foundation, Inc. does wonders.
These things are never as simple as they first appear.
Aussie youth bailed on Toronto partners.
It looks like Hotline didn't have much choice but to sue for the IP. At any rate it is a particularly strange story.
It is my understanding that contracts often do have stipulations such as this in it, but if you reread his article he states that large companies have more resources to hire lawyers to make sure that they get what they want. If they can keep you from having enough money to get a lawyer, you will almost assuredly loose. (Also remember that the right to representation, right not to incriminate yourself etc only applies to criminal cases not civil).
There is a civil war coming in the United States. Remember which side has most of the guns
A fool and his money were lucky to get together in the first place.
By SUE CANT
There is nothing so silly as other peoples traditions, and nothing so sacred as our own.
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"Death is a motherfucker. Death is the end of this known existence."
The big difference is that with a P2P architecture, the data is stored locally on each client machine, not centrally located on a server. From the leech's perspective, this makes little difference, but when issues like copyright infringement come into play, the physical data storage location, and becomes quite important. Also, if any server infrastructure is required at all, a significant portion of the overhead of a P2P system is off-loaded to the clients, while the server merely has to keep all of the peers in sync. Basically, it's a somewhat monolithic design vs. a more distributed design.
I write trance music.
Many employers make you sign an agreement stating that anything you do with company resources is company property, whether it's Art, Music, Research, or writing a computer program, whether or not the thing you write has anything to do with that company's business. Always read what you sign when you start a new job.
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"A dessert without cheese is like a beautiful woman who has lost an eye." -- Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin
Of course, this would not have been an issue if the software were free'd.
The business world is extremely evil.
I'm a 19yr old coder.
This past August - October I worked for Aurora Casket for 2 months without contract. They paid me my first 2 weeks pay in a company check right on time. So I assumed no problems and as the project was so short on time I figured 0 problem to finish it out and pick up a final check after everything was done.
Well the goals kept changing, the specs kept changing, and many new issues popp'd up through dev. I did the best as was humanly possible while doing this job and working 2 days a week at a different company. I stayed up all night several nights in a row working on the project.
Come game time and the basics were done, 5 things on my list weren't and in that time they finally found someone locally who'd work cheap and came on full time to replace me when I was done.
During this time management thought things out and changed their ideas, decided to screw me over/drop my code/not pay me, and have this new kid start over with a better well thought out idea.
End of year I had to pay taxes on that first bit of money they gave me ($2500), meanwhile being shorted the $10,000 they still owed me for all my other hours work.
I don't have the grounds to fight them in court and by that point I was so screwed for cash there was no way I could afford to. 2 days a week pay doesn't leave much left over.
That taught me a painful lesson, I still don't typically work under contract but I demand regular payments and refuse to work if a bill is over 2 weeks overdue.
Is there any place I can find cookie cutter IT contracts online that I could start using to protect myself?
Anywhere to find advice about tax laws etc...?
I'm a coder not a tax man / lawyer, and a site with info to help out us naive so to speak would be great.
Even on a smaller scale, I have noticed how many (even, most) people seem to try very hard to maintain a poor lifestyle.
An example is house painters. They make a LOT of money. They often insist on payment in (untraceable, untaxable) cash. But, what do they do when they are paid? They go buy a ton of cigarettes and half a truckload of beer, which comprise the main necessities of their lifestyle. Meanwhile, their children are hungry and dressed in rags and they have to drive a 22-yr old pickup truck that can barely move.
There are certainly exceptions to this, but it is nonetheless very common.
Third option. Work for someone else with the assumption that what you create is owned by them. If you can't accept your creations being the property of some corporate entity, then go back to one of the first two options.
They got the gold mine, he got the shaft...
At least here in California.
Just abolish the whole idea of "intellectual property". Copyrights may be ok, but patents (software as well as business practice) must go.Unlimited growth == Cancer.
He created a programming language to write hotline in. The server that I hang out on use the last version that he worked on (1.2.3), and refuse to use the new ones (1.8.x+).
Good luck Adam Hinkley on your new endevors!
I completely agree. I don't understand why I have to prove it to them that what I create at home is mine. But the nice thing for me is that what I create at home uses completely different technoligies and OSes. My office is all MS, and at home I am all Linux/Open Source. But it should be made that an employer should have to prove that they provided you all the necessary equipment and resources to create your project.
First of all, it's not peer2peer. It's client-server.
There are still a few trackers where the original hotline community lives on. Like the "No Banner" types and such. (www.tracker-tracker.com for a listing). Just today I did a quick refresh of blight.dhs.org and was greeted by a listing of servers that were all banner free, usually running pre-1.5 servers or hx (a free hotline clone for unix {a port has been made to win32} http://hx.fortyoz.org/ for more details), and pretty much all of them had guest download on. The server owners were quite friendly in fact. Hotline is far from the decaying cess pit you describe.
Of course there are many banner scheme servers. But if you look beyond that and use a real tracker you'll see what I mean.
Also, he DID persue legal action against Hotline Communications LTD...and lost.
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This is amazingly mature - something I didn't learn until I was at least 23!
Seriously - it's amazing what you can do when you really want to do something. People have an amazing capacity to do things, it's just than 95% of us never do anything with that capacity!
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Yes, they ripped him off by making him the company president and the chief technology officer. I hate it when that happens to me...
I don't think that that's what happened. On his last day as president of the company, Adam took down the web servers, encrypted the code base, and left with a copy of the code burned to CD. The owners immediately filed several suits against him, and had the police raid his home. Adam was facing jail time and stiff fines, so he relented and unlocked the code.
I've followed the story of Hinkley and Hotline over the last few years, and it seems that the whole story has not been said. Hinkley always talks about getting burned, and certainly there were some emotional stand-offs with his company exec's. However, according to this rather detailed account of Hinkley's struggles, his former boss says that he would very much like to have Hinkley back.
Let's be practical...it makes no business sense to rob your star programmer blind and show him the door. Sure, his investors secured the rights to the code in a draconian fashion, but they went to the extrodianry step of making this teenager the president of the company. Something tells me that Adam realized got ticked off when he realized he turned over all property rights, and the friction probably grew when he found out that these seasoned businessmen were treating this teenager as president in name only. I can't say as I entirely blame them, although they shouldn't have made him president in the first place. It was obviously just a tactic to try to keep him onboard.
I wish the kid the best and hope he finds the success he deserves, but frankly, it seems that there has yet to be an account written by an objective 3rd party who can tell us how much of the problem was Hinkley's youth and business inexperience. Signing away all IP rights was pretty naive for a "company president".
As I said in another post, I've followed the Hotline story, and everyone paints Adam's side, but I always see the red flags going up. Something tells me that this kid is a hothead, to expect that at 17 or 18, his investors are going to let him do as he pleases with the company. They probably did have him on a string, but only because he alowed himself to be put there.
I mean, really -- would anyone here take seriously a company president who accidentally signed away all his IP rights because he didn't know any better?
Because some people like to get physical reward (money) for their creations. This is the principal upon which capitalism is based: you do something in order to get something. Personally, how I license my code depends on how it's used. If I write, say, a unique CGI for a site that adds competitive value for the owner, then it goes under a proprietary license. If I'm writing something that's not all that unique (message board, etc.) then I use something simular to the "beer license".
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Do you even know anything about perl? -- AC Replying to Tom Christiansen post.
Something that you do for you, cause you are having fun.
In this case I'd probably beer license it unless it was something that I knew would make me filthy rich... lol.
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Do you even know anything about perl? -- AC Replying to Tom Christiansen post.
Do not trust people who have not EARNED your trust. The world is not a nice place filled with wonderful folks and money brings out the worst.
Repeat one hundred times per day or until assimilated.
"Computers are useless. They can only give you answers."
"Computers are useless. They can only give you answers."
-- Pablo Picasso
It is a daunting task to form a corporation as a high school student though. While incorporating isn't that complicated, there are significant costs involved and the fear is that something will be done wrong and later come back to haunt the organizers.
So many invention-seeking firms exist precisely because of these difficulties. Sadly, I suspect that many of these companies are of less than stellar character.
But this story has brought out more drones than I've ever seen in a slashdot post. It reminds me of the wall to wall MSCEs you'll find in some shops, who'll spout freedom to innovate stuff entirely unprovoked (okay, maybe I did complain about no grep).
My question is, where did they all come from? Between Frost Pists and BSD is dying, I haven't seen anything to believe this is the normal slashdot crowd. You just don't see them getting up in arms about some kid getting upset that his program taken from him by a corporation. And even the goatse guys know more about intellectual property than those who twist the facts about Hink "closing" the source to the company he sold it to.
Plus, these guys know way too much about the case. Anyone remember trying to find out what actually happened with Randall Schwartz? I read both the news story and Hinkley's rant, and still don't know what actually happened.
M$ is evil, Gnome vs. KDE, ESR vs. RMS, Napster, an awk HTTPD running on a supercooled atari; these are the things that slashdotters get excited about.
"[the head of the company] said that what he really wanted was that Hinkley come back." ...
"The final Hotline Connect release ... took place last month" ...
"New features include an enhanced client interface with a dynamic toolbar..."
Now we see what the company was really upset about. It wasn't so much code that was already written that they missed.
OK, so lets say it is illegal and becomes invalidated since you didn't have their acceptance of being recorded. My question is if you (supposedly) left a recorder on permanently to maybe make a record of your life or something , does this now become legal since the recording was not intentional?
"The best way to become a millionaire is to be a billionaire and start an airline"
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I hereby inform you that I have NOT been required to provide any decryption keys.
Amen brother!
I got so sick of the numerous Hotline sites that would only let you download once you clicked on a dozen banners to get the password, that I set up my own leech server. "Upload if you want, but you don't have too!"
I found that people were so thrilled not to have to dick around with banners and whatnot that they'd upload more stuff than I knew what to do with. I know I got more uploads this way than if I made it a requirement.
I wish more Hotline sites understood this.
Last night I shot an elephant in my pajamas. How he got in my pajamas I'll never know.
Nice sig.
Karma: Good (despite my invention of the Karma: sig)
Since I am no fan of vapour, there have been no announcements of a date or feature set for Hotline 2.0. But it is progressing.
;-)
Have no doubt, it will rock. I won't be looking for a job anytime soon !
Wow, someone who actually uses his mind.
Rare indeed.
Read a lot of Ayn Rand?
They can because they often want you to sign a contract that says "anything you do with/without company resource, with/without others, belongs to us". If you sign it, you're screwed.
I agree with your advice -- I've heard of from plenty of people but I'm living the uber counter example to that advice right now.
... and I loan him money if need be. He'll loan me money.
... and I work with him. He's a few cubes down right now probably being more productive than I at the moment.
... and we're part of a team of 5 people that are starting with own line of software. It's not commercial yet; but this means we can often be found putting in 40 hours at our real job, 25-30 more on the 2ndary job, then partying together on the weekend with our common set of friends.
I live with a guy I've been friends with for about 5 years. We've been pretty close the entire time; our hobbies are all the same; and we enjoy the same line of work.
There's only been one shouting match in the year we've been doing this. And it was over something completey unrelated to work, home, and money.
So, it -can- work. But it's not often.
Justin Buist
What if someone were to incorporate themself and thus hold two positions. Perhaps a company might be able to specifically forbid working for another company in the contract (I don't know... I am not a lawyer or a programmer beyond Intro to Pascal ;-) ), but I figure some companies wouldn't. Thus when on the clock for your own personal coding, it's owned by John Smith Programming Inc. not by Evil Empire of Application Creation That Pays For the Roof and the Bread. Anyone know?
So close and yet so far from the world's perfect ID number
What that sounds like to me is you need a Union.
So close and yet so far from the world's perfect ID number
I know, hence why I only said this is one of those "situations."
Second, free speech is not always about what you like or do not like. Sometimes it is about what is right or wrong. Sometimes free speech restricts other rights, and when that is the case, it is up to the Supreme Court (or whatever supreme law-force) to decide which is the greater injustice. Sure, the freedom of speech is covered by the first amendment of the U.S. Constitution, but that does not mean that it is always the greater injustice when infringed upon. If a Nazi organization published the names of thousands of Jews on its web site with the intent of providing means for other Nazis to seek out and harm these Jews (hypothetical situation, here), what would be the greater injustice? Restricting the Nazis' free speech? Or allowing these Jews to be harmed or worse by letting the Nazis' free speech stand?
I partially agree. In my thinking this only applies with the self-made men. Inherited wealth and accumulating that wealth with the help of paid professionals is another thing.
sigh
I've been working at my current company since October of last year. A group of us were brought over from a dot-com when it's B2C component was purchased.
We'd been here for about two months when they passed around an Intellectual Property Agreement that they required us to sign. Of course, the basic wording amounted to all your create are belong to us -- whatever spewed forth from my brain was theirs.
Sorry, but they're not paying me enough to have the contents of my brain.
A few of us raised a such a major stink over this that we got them to rewrite the agreement with the wording "as it directly applies to the sale of health insurance on the Internet"...it was, of course, better expressed than that. Basically, it amounts to they can't touch general ideas, or anything unrelated to the online selling of health insurance.
Raise a stink. It'll help cover your ass.
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Yo soy El Fontosaurus Grande!
blog |
So much for the standard Republican criticism of high taxes and Social Security, "average people can manage their own money better than the government can!"
We know where leadership by an anti-intellectual "strongman" who scapegoats minorities and likes boisterous rallies goes
Employment: NEVER write your own software while you are an employee of someone else, EVEN if you do it in your own time. While technically you might be within your rights, your employer most likely has far more resources to fight you than you do to defend yourself Thats why this was #1 in the article. When it comes to fighting a company, it doesn't matter how clear cut the case is. Without money to legally defend (or assert) your claims you're screwed. The company can just bury you in paperwork or other useless things which do nothing but eat money. Not to mention that most companies won't bother to agree to your terms anyway. Karrade
It's hard to judge exactly what happened, with the scant detail posted, but I presume that the fight was who had the right to use AW libraries.
While I applaud Adam for having the wit to write great code that someone else was very much interested it, I don't have much to say about his ability to protect is won iterests. Perhaps he was too young and gullible to have done any better, or perhpas he simply did not care at the time. The fact is that he did not do enough to protect himself.
As for the company, you can look at their actions from a different angle instead of painting them as a villainous lot. Lets not forget that the company in question had a vested interest in retaining the ownership of the code, preceisely because it was something useful and gave them an edge over the competition. This competitive advantage was obvously of great importance, enough to pursue legal action agains anyone (including it's creator) who would take it away from them. It might have even been a matter of survival.
Ignorance is not an exuse. Life's tough, so what ya goanna do about that?
Interestingly, some of the more intelligent animal species exhibit the same behavior. Chimpanzees in particular, having been taught sign language, were observed to look behind themselves when "speaking" about the future.
Quantum mechanics: the dreams that stuff is made of.
I think we all know HCL will do a lot more good with this technology than that stupid kid would...
With the release of macro's plugin to zombie, hotline is now p2p and client/server, check it out over at the badmoon website.
I read his, I sort of read theirs... I'd be interested in reading a fairer account.
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This
As I recall there was a study done just on this subject. Basically the premise is true. People who receive a large lump sum of money from a lottery will typically "blow it". The article pointed out that it wasn't just wasting the money on junk but that these people made poor financial decisions simply because they'd never been faced with the problems associated with a large amount of money. It also went on to say that those people that received payments in the form of a yearly annuity had a better chance of success because while they might make the same mistakes they learned from them and were able to manage later payments more effectively.
If you read Adam's insights, you would have seen that he specifically addresses this. His opinion is that no IP agreement is defendable. The point is that they have more money than you do to win the case (or at least out last you) -- even if you are in the right.
Doug Alcorn
I apologize, i didn't proofread.... Roks no longer has anything in the company either. And he comes onto the long standing hotline server badmoon where I spend much of my time on the internet. He seems to be a good guy. However; there was a time when he was imaginably upset with the current situation of hotline, and with hinks running off with the AW code. He basically disowns hinks in these chat logs. He was practicing smart business, and that doesn't make him the bad guy. I'm sorry that the post was unclear. =) Roks is okay by me.
Remember that you are unique, just like everybody else.
Hotline is the first peer to peer program that I can remember that really took off. I remember discovering Hotline Client back in 1997. You would often see Hinkley listening to the people on various servers, (boffomac, etc) I also remember the battle between HLC, and Hinks. The whole sob story, his sisters dissappearence, his breaching the contract with HLC to go home.(what 17 year old wouldn't). Now the company is out of the hands of ROKS (Jason Roks, one of the canadian investors) I still use hotline 1.2.3 or an unix clone hx hx.fortyoz.org I really guess I don't have a point here, but this story struck close to home. The non competition agreement he signed ruined a few of the best years of his life. I hope the best for hinks and his family in the future. -Rusty
Remember that you are unique, just like everybody else.
If the IP doesn't belong to you, then you don't have the right to release it under any license GPL or not.
Even if you are the one who wrote the code and a court later rules that the copyright belongs to your employer you can be found to have infringed on their copyright by releasing it.
Si vis pacem, para bellum
The only thing more annoying than a Libertarian is an (un|mis)informed Libertarian
You have to take a lot of what he said with a grain of salt. This guy was screwed. It would be paranoia to say everyone with an interest in writing their own software would be equally as screwed.
- I don't care if they globalize against free speech. All my best free thoughts are done in my head.
I've worked for a version 1 company in '94 and everything imploded, despite the fact that the product was good, well ahead of its time, customer driven and it filled a market demand.
I agree so much with your statements about planning. Looking back on founding my own company (a modest database consultancy outfit) my best decision (apart from running a decent OS) was to craft a business plan.
The important part is not the plan as such, but the fact that you are forced to really confront all those issues (product, market need, competition, financing whathaveyou...) that solely exist somewhat neboulusly in your head.
ich bin der musikant
mit taschenrechner in der hand
kraftwerk
Those unfamilier with the story link me, have no idea whats going on....
From what I can figure, he started a company based on his code.. Then....
Hinkley quit both companies in abrupt circumstances, in 1997 and 1998, leaving behind a confusing trail of intellectual property ownership.
So he quit a company that he partials owns and started (but has investors in) and he expects to be able to take all his code along with him for no charge ??
Please enlighten me further.....
I used to use Hotline like 4 years ago? I don't even remember but it was around the betas. I still love Hotline though for my 140K/sec d/les I used to get over it.
*nostalgic sigh*
I don't have any respect for Rox. I used to have a few chat logs supposedly of him basically saying he didn't care about his users etc. What a bastard compared to Hinks.
He was the first programmer of any decent software (that I've seen!) that you actually easily talk to on a consistant basis and would be attentive to what you wanted.
And now I d/led the Hotline Client 1.8.4 the other day, and everything is (A)banner scams and (B) PC war3z servers. Ugh...
&LOL I remember I used hotline to d/l like 3/4 of every Pink Floyd album there was on a 33.6 over spring break one year.
[/random]
,
faeryman
I can agree with that. however this is in the idea of "off-time" hacks. Something that you do for you, cause you are having fun. Otherwise I agree completely.
If we don't make light of everything, we are just stumbling in the dark - Blank
This really boils down to who ended up owning the software when. As the article stated it was more or less confusing. Most people (myself included) draw a distinct line between free work and paid work. There are times when they cross (say for instance I write a small utility in my spare off time that I want to use at work) but by doing the work in my spare time, according to MY employment contract, it may be licensed by me under the license of my choice. As a case in point, when I worked for Lockheed Martin, I could not do this (one of the reasons I left) because my employment contract basically stated I could not do anything technically oriented (kind of a broad term) and patent/copyright - whatever - without letting them review it first and deciding whether or not they wanted it. This is a case of naivety, nothing more.
"if you are so clever why ain't you rich"
If asked 90% of the people think their IQ is above average.
Poetic justice? Hotline (which is client/server, NOT P2P, btw) has degraded into a banner revenue machine...perhaps their slew of advertisers will realize that focusing ads to pr0n hounds and war3z leechers is not such a brilliant idea (as it is, most of these types use nobanner hacked versions of HL anyway...)
Here's their typically self-serving slant on the court ruling.
If you have about 3 hours to kill, read the judgement in its entirety and marvel and the byzantine particulars of this case.
The ideas have been around for 2500 years. There have been counter arguments for that long also. I don't think that they are facts, and I don't think that they are right.
Phil
To me the depressing thing is that you should have to get this agreement in the first place. I can not see why the burden of proof is on the employee.
Actually it was not always so. In the UK the copyright patents and design act of 1988 was the thing that changed this situation. Before that the employer would have to prove that their advice, or equipment or whatever was vital to the production of software to claim IP on it. What you wrote in your free time was yours.
Nowadays the situation has gone completely mad. My employers provide me with very little, but they still have me by the short and curlies. And there was me thinking that the IP law was supposed to support innovation?
Phil
You are wrong I am afraid. Because I work as a programmer (or rather part of my work is as a programmer), my employer has a fairly good claim on any programming work that I do, whether or not it is in any way related to the work that I am doing.
"going by your first piece of advice, does this mean McDonald's has the rights to the many database programs i've written for any given business that has contracted me to do so."
It needs to be more or less at the same time. If you write stuff after you were employed then they will have a harder time showing that you did the work with the resources that you got from them.
The work also needs to be related. If you write a novel, or a work on how to repair boats, then you are quite safe. And of course if you don't work as a programmer, but write programs in your spare time, then again your employer has little rights to your work.
And of course all of this depends on what your contract says. But generally speaking if it doesn't say that you DONT have to give them IP, then by default they get the IP.
At least thats how it is in the UK. I should imagine that its the same in the US as well, probably worse if anything. Its the way of the world. You think that you do the work, and they pay you, but in reality they are buying far far more rights to everything and anything that comes out of your mind.
Welcome to the crazy world of IP law.
Phil
Well all I can say is that I think you are wrong. My work generates only IP (I am a research scientist), and my employer has a good claim on pretty much everything that I do. I can not claim "overtime" because I have no contracted hours anyway. It's called a "salary".
Perhaps the law is different in the US. Perhaps not.
Phil
Well the former more than anything else I agree. "There is something rich people have that poor people don't have (besides money) but it's not politically correct to admit it."
This argument has been used for about the last 2500 years. I still think that its shite. The Greeks used it to justify their empire and slavery. At least until the Romans came along. The British used it for the same reason. Our Kings used to be different and where they were because that was what God wanted.
You can use whatever arguments you like to justify a heavily class ridden society like yours or mine, but I think that they are as wrong as they have ever been. Call me politically correct if you like. Its not something that I find to be a term of particularly strong abuse.
Phil
Show me one instance where the ACLU has ever helped a company sue an individual......I didn't think so.
Jaysyn
There is a war going on for your mind.
You forgot the 3rd option. Get some high explosives and pay
the corporate headquarters a visit.
Does it help get you some money back? No. But it makes you feel better...
(eat your heart out echelon... EMBASSY! DETONATOR!)
~- Llah -~
So does this mean that we should be afraid that Transmeta is going to snag Linux from Linus just because he works for them, close the sorce and do like Microsoft and monopolize?
B.S.
--------------
--------------
$_='hfflbwfsbhfzp vs';s/(^.{4})(.{7 })(.+$)/$3 $2 $1/
IANAL, but I'm fairly shure the 'clauses' on the aboved website are too vague to help that much in the USA, mayby standing law/case law in Astralia provide sufficient framework, but here in the US there are too many ways to get screwed by the companies with those one paragraph wonders.
The longest one actually could make matters worse! depending on your employment situation as it starts out giving all sorts of rights to your employer.
My advice if you want to write software that your employer cannot encumber in any way is to get a REAL lawyer of your very own!
I worry for a society that has has laws that require such consultations on nearly everything as ours (USA) does. But thats what you get when you let lawyers write laws. And thats what we have so try and deal with it smartly rather than niavely.
Mycroft
". Investment: You DO NOT need it, and it is NOT worth the trouble! "
Yeah, one hell of a sound warning.
How far will one get without any funding at all.
No, smart ones.
I did some programming work in my own time - no pay, written contract, etc. The question of IP has never been discussed in five years. At the time, the bosses didn't even want it to be done. But, as a result, I got a promotion, I have even seen my software on TV (a laptop with my program prominent in a news item), it is being used throughout a significant industry in my state, I was moved into IT (now 2nd in charge), I get all sorts of useful IT benefits, and I have an interesting and diverse job. I am quite happy about this.
And I know others who have put their own private software into their jobs, and reaped serious rewards from a grateful employer (even a multi-national).
Moral: Not every tourist gets mugged by the locals.
It all depends.
I am anarch of all I survey.
Want the real truth? Fat is he left them a copy of the source, but he would encode every single version of the software so that no one else could read it / compile it. Ah well..been using hotline since b16 (~Dec 96) and its too bad hl has turned out to be such a landfill of slow, ad hungry sites. But, what do you expect from windows users? (I am one said windows users...) Fact is on the mac, hl was friendly because the users were friendly. Once it got ported, sure the user base rockets, but the quality was shot in the leg. I attribute this to a different mindset found in windows users. i still find hl a great app, but at this point using it is hopeless. mm..the good old days...
I seem to remember hearing that somewhere.
--- I used to moderate, then I read the -1 articles and decided having to filter through them was not worth it.
I'm confused now. I thought IP was considered bad around here. Are we now supposed to feel sorry for Mr. Hinkley? Is IP only bad in the hands of corporations, but good when owned by individuals? Tell me what to believe!!!
Cunning linguists
bigredg.com has their "own" press release on how it all went down. not even a mention of adam...
"The chief enemy of creativity is 'good taste'" -Pablo Picasso
He encrypts the stuff on his computer, and suddenly the company no longes has access to the source?! This means there were no backups. And that means everyone involved was pretty stupid..
Aint gonna be no unified front (there never is) and with this economy all the leverage is on the employer's side.
The only real way for everyone to win is to remove these insane laws that give intellectual monopolies in the first place. All these other problems are just side-effects of that failed concept.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
~~ the real world is much simpler ~~
--- -- - -
Give me LIBERTY, or give me a check.
Here is an example where the author of a terrific product was stopped from expanding on his creation because (this part is funny) he did not own it.
How much do we lose so that companies can extract royalties? In a world without monoply rights these things do not happen.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
~~ the real world is much simpler ~~
--- -- - -
Give me LIBERTY, or give me a check.
Aha! That might explain the odd feeling I got when I went to an interview with them 9 months-year ago.
And I don't think that their jobs page has changed in all that time. *whew*, dodged a bullet.
And later picked up one somewhere else, but that's the developer business for you!
Ron of that ilk.
One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
All your mod points are belong to us!
Well, someone had to say it -- after all, you can't Beowulf cluster them.
One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
His advice is very sound.
Expect nothing from those around you except what you earn on your own terms.
And especially follow the 'everything in writing' part -- even with 'good friends'.
It's a greedy, litigious world out there...
-nowt
A strange game. The only winning move is not to play. How about a nice game of chess? - Joshua (Wargames)
With regards to your #1 and #3, I think you're a bit off. You sound as naive as he first was. It is safe to assume that any business is out to make a profit, period. That's the defintion of a business. You can try to fight it, but unless you have extrememly deep pockets to pay for layers (and even then you may lose), it's a futile effort. If you want to go ahead and trust everyone, and give everyone the benefit of the doubt, I can guarantee 100% that at some point, maybe even more than once. You will get screwed. It doesn't take that much effort to just cover your ass, so why not? Hell, every time I go into a job, I tell the employer that I do work on the side and that's mine. I write that on the contract. It takes all of a minute. That extra minute at the negotiation table is well worth the countless hours of good sleep I get every night knowing that my independent projects won't be gobbled up.
And perhaps IT unions in the US would drive work right out of the country, faster than it's already going.
There may not be a lot of free time on the job, but that is only 8 hours a day 5 days a week (if you get full time. Waiters in really busy places can get by on parttime. Tips ROCK). So you now have another 6-12 hours (depending on how much sleep you need and what grooming level you like to maintain) to think over problems without working 20 hour days many days in a row having to hit some artificial deadline set by some marketing weasel. As an added bonus, you get to work on stuff YOU think is important.
Hi,
Your homepage is very hard to read.
Would you mind changing either the backgroud or the fonts color?
By the way, i always admire people with lower #id...
Everyone was young once. I am not particularly old, in my mid-twenties. But before i work in my current, and first, computer consulting company, i was as naive as what this guy seems to be. Or was like other people who ... hate MS. But now i grow up a bit and knows that in business not everything is black and white.
Ricky
Well, it depends on your idea of "no funding." Depending on where you look, how much you look, how much legwork you're willing to do (the critical and overlooked aspect to starting a business is that it's about 2% inspiration and 98% perspiration), you can find some astonishing sources of funding...provided you're willing to work hard to find and secure them. All that without any investor meddling whatsoever.
...unless you count time investment. The catch is, of course, that it's an astonishing amount of work which will probably take you away from coding (or whatever) full-time for days, weeks, or even months at a time. However, it is also a sort of one-shot investment of time.
I'm not a geek, I'm just a clever script.
The most important is getting everything in writing. Like a fool, in the desire to work near my hometown, I took a job, but the deal was that $7000 of my pay was to be held until the project completion. Well, I got it close to done in 6 months, but then feature creep set in (by the VP, not me), we had to add better versions of competitor's enhancements to their products, etc. Then I got sick, had to get surgery, and was out a month. So now it's a year I'm working on this, and when I return, I'm told I had to get it done in a month to claim $5000, or two months to claim $3500! I quit via fax two days later. So the moral is, get things in writing. All I had was an email where we clarified if this was a bonus or pay withheld (it was pay withheld!). But I don't know if that would hold up in court as enough of a contract to claim they broke it with the "offer" upon my return. I just said the hell with it, moved to an actual city, and now am making nearly twice as much. But never trust it unless it's signed on the dotted line!
lol
if you don't use any company resources to write your software, and it is in no way associated with the bussiness you currently work for, then how can the even begin to claim rights to it?
Correct me if I'm wrong, but writting software when your employed by someone does not grant them any right to the software you're developing. Unless of course you have been contracted by that company to create that software. Thats the only time you can get into copyright issues. Besides, if you were to only write software when you were unemployed, how could you afford to do it in the first place. --- going by your first piece of advice, does this mean McDonald's has the rights to the many database programs i've written for any given business that has contracted me to do so... i don't think so.
I let myself become a victim of this with my first job out of college. I was promised a large raise of $15,000 but when it came time for the promotion, I only received a mere $3000. Their so called explanation was suddenly the product wasn't doing so well but if I can make it grow, they increase my salary.
I wasn't about to be screwed over again. So I started to look for another job after that. It took awhile but I had the satisifaction of doing close to no work for a several months. My advice to the recent graduated is never trust employers unless it's in writing and it's been looked over by a lawyer.
"Hinkley quit both companies in abrupt circumstances, in 1997 and 1998, leaving behind a confusing trail of intellectual property ownership."
After selling your soul, it's a little too late to back out of the deal. We aren't told why Adam left, and he may have had good reasons, but it seems doubtful he had a plan. After you give away the magic goose you would be foolish to except to still get golden eggs. If at all possible, don't walk without a backup plan.
"Hinkley and his father were without legal representation during the latter part of the complex court case, which began in early 1999. This followed a raid on Adam's parents' homes on September 11, 1998."
If you're going to take on a mega corp you are going to need a lawyer.
"The Hinkleys could not afford to pay an expert witness to appear at the hearing on their behalf."
You are also going to need money. A lot of it. Lawsuits are expensive.
A steaming cup of soykaf would be real wiz right now.
A dentist in our town won the lottery twice! At a 1e6 a pop he's OK; his son is in prison, the second DUI resulted in wrecked corvette and one leg amputated.
Apocalypse Cancelled, Sorry, No Ticket Refunds
I wasn`t speaking from a "politically correct" stance and I certainly wasn`t trying to claim different values for intelligence, or indeed 2.
The basic point I am making is that the "educated class" tend to elevate their own brand of academic intelligence above other demonstrable forms of intelligence and use spurious arguments about nurture to justify their ludicrous claims for superiority.
Any population sample will tend to have a random spread of "intelligent" people all over the class spectrum. (you can forget about intelligent parents having more intelligent children, or vice-versa, due to random factors and mendellian regression).
I have met plenty educated stupid people and plenty uneducated intelligent people.
A crash reduces
Your expensive computer
A crash reduces
Your expensive computer
to a simple stone.
(any scottish people in the audience can now picture me with my tounge sticking into my lower lip/chin and making a noise like duhhhhh)
if 95% are above average then it is not average anymore. By definition exactly 50% are above average. (before the pedants start talking about 3 different types of average, the stanford-binet IQ definition is based on arithmetic mean, so the above is correct.)
A crash reduces
Your expensive computer
A crash reduces
Your expensive computer
to a simple stone.
> Conclusion: the poor are less likely to enjoy healthy neurological development and are therefore less likely to be intelligent than the rich.
you missed a couple of steps:
Assertion: There are statistically as many "intelligent" (not necesarily educated) children in poor ares as rich.
Assertion: Intelligence is manifested in many diferent ways, academic intelligence is just one of them.
Assertion: Rich children tend to have better education and grow up in an environment which nurtures academic curiousity so are therefore more likely to be considered more intelligent.
Assertion: While your theory about neurological development is very interesting, I detect a slight elitist bias.
Conclusion: You are talking shite.
A crash reduces
Your expensive computer
A crash reduces
Your expensive computer
to a simple stone.
I know an engineer that wrote a timeclock app for his company, on his own time. They used it and at first they did not want to pay for it, but finally they did when he said he'd remove it if they did not.
Advice...
If you are an engineer and write software, the simplest thing to do write some expiration code if they haven't registered it. That helps alot if they decide not to pay for it later on. Plus make sure you can resell it.
Moving at the speed of government.
> We see that even though Adam did violate the terms of employment, he had no intent to cause harm to the plaintiff,
How'd you get to THAT? I mean, the kid wiped out source and encrypted the rest before he bailed without notice, preventing them from developing a product they legally purchased from him.
How can that NOT be classified as malicious?
As dumb as IP rights are, people on this forum have to get their heads out of the sand and realize this kid very nearly screwed over a company who was perfectly within their rights to do what they did.
I don't know if it's 80%, but I do recall a figure of 56% back in 1990. Mostly what happens is that "new friends" come into the picture. Sad to say that most people don't realize that the first thing that they should do is find a lawyer and one of the big accounting firms. That layer of protection is what stop's them.
I have in the pass assisted in helping someone that had inherited a large fortune and gave him this advice. "Tell everyone that your investment advisor has already placed your investment and they are locked for a few years". He still has all his money, but every time we?re together he will always thank me for that.
Onepoint
spambait e-mail
my web site artistcorner.tv hip-hop news
please help me make it better
if you see me, smile and say hello.
what you expect from a company to do to a teenager who is in strange country. take him for all he's worth, and make sure he's not allowed to compete untill the progrma is obsolete. Thats all they ever wanted to do, get rid of him thats all. Screw HLC. Bunch of idiots and swines.
bigmat
Wow - it's been a long time. I worked/volunteered for Hotline Comm. when the Adam Hinkley thing was big, hot news. I was there when Jason Roks was in charge (is he still around?) and when HLServer.com actually pointed somewhere. There was a group of people that had been abandoned by a company that was working with HL, Hotwire Communications. We kind of just fell into place at HL when Hotwire folded; I honestly don't know how it happened. We served HL as the test group for all their new betas. I was (I believe) their sole PC tester in that group. Anyway, I think there's fault on both sides of the line. Hinks was an idiot for believing that verbal agreements actually mean something and the people at HL were arrogant in their assault of him. Man, there was a lot of flaming of him going on - we weren't even allowed to talk about it or bring it up. Plus I think that HL has nicely screwed up their self-titled product. Or, at least, it's concept is obsolete because of the various other platforms of communication/"p2p". Are they still trying to produce online applications similar to HL for businesses? If only I could find all the people I used to work with - Willa, Dave and company. You guys out there? It's me, Adamm - adam@nozone.net.
i dunno, i got this cousin named vinnie....
I am a member of a major entertainment design union and I have to say, many of the problems technology workers face are issues that I face as well. What your need is a union to protect your collective interests. I do not work by the hour and am considered a professional under the fair labor standards act. I have read many posts here about IT workers and management clashing over intellectual property rights, and assure you this is not new. As an designer, I create for my employer, but I am the sole owner of the copyright to my work. Depending on the project, I may even request royalties for my work. We are not business people, but we want our fair share of the profits made from our work.
--
Scientists restrict study to entire physical universe; creationist
His advice is something you really, really should to take to heart. You may choose not to follow it, and there may be good reasons to, but you run significant risks if you do.
As for Hotline, I think the claims of "innovation" are somewhat overblown. Hotline probably succeeded because it was a well-written piece of software and was at the right place at the right time, not because it did something nobody else had done before. Several other academic groups and companies, however, have been working on similar functionality for years.
Except of course in that case the GNU people are the large ugly corporation stealing the single programmers IP...
Actually... it depends on where you are.
In some places you only need the consent of one of the participants. Some jurisdictions you need the consent of all participants and some places you're not allowed to do it at all.
What makes this really interesting is when you do a telephone interview/contract neg. over the phone internationally - then who's law applies?
Thank God we have lawyers in the U. S. that can cry "unreasonable search and siesure..."
This doesn't like he's been able to shrug off this experience at all. He sounds pretty bitter to me. He ought to relax and go code for a pr0n site for a while, or something...
------ 1001001
His password is "diamonds-are-a-Perls-best-friend"
IN TEH FUCHAR, LITERSY WLIL EB OPSHANAL!!!!!111
just curious, i'm a php programmer for a public company, and also create a php online game (edrugtrader.com)... should i serious stop working on the game? the employer already knows about it, and it probably was the reason they hired me. mike
MARIJUANA, SHROOMS, X: ONLINE?! - E
I have worked many jobs and found lots of employers will lie to you, ask you to do things that are not quite legal, etc. I
have a solution.
Some years ago I was working for a company that would ask you to work 12 hours but only report 8.
"It was for the company." They would have you work 12 hour shifts and from time to time give you a call
and say "We can not get any one to relieve you. Do you mind working the next shift?" say no and you are out, accept
and keep your job.
I began carrying a micro cassette recorder on me with a tie pin mike from radio shack. I would set it to voice activate
and record any conversation with my employer. When I did loose the job they gave me all my pay and a nice
severance package. I began carrying it to interviews. It really came in handy when I would interview, get the job, note
something was not in the contract and play the promise of the HR person. Needless to say it became a great tool. It
seems that here a recording is a verbal contract and very binding!
Blackmail. Work at any corporation and you will immediately find out that they do something terribly illegal. In fact, if you're in IT, you're definitely going to find out. You manage their information. You see everything. You know all. When the time comes you can truly make them pay.
Of course, plenty of companies are 100% law biding, but chances are if they'd ever want to sue you when they first considered you a friend, they'd have just the right kind of greedy mentality to do plenty of illegal stuff.
Sorry if this is getting off-topic but ... since when is Hotline "peer-to-peer"?
As far as I understand it, there are two components to a Hotline system. Two different software programs. They even go so far as to call one the "Hotline client," and then they call the other the "Hotline server." Does this not sound more like... dare I say it, in this we're-way-past-all-that 21st Century... the Client-Server model??
It seems to me that the only reason they refer to Hotline as a peer-to-peer app is that peer-to-peer gets a lot of snazzy media attention these days, and since Hotline is now owned by some kind of corporation, they like that sort of thing. That, and it seemed like the upcoming Hotline2 was going to more resemble a true peer-to-peer app.
I'm actually surprised Microsoft hasn't started calling itself the "world leader in peer-to-peer file sharing," or something of the kind. Cuz after all, peer-to-peer is built right in to every Windows box.
--
Breakfast served all day!
I've been told that I'm wise (I just think I'm sensible), and I need a million dollars.
Indeed, I need several *billion* dollars.
Because, dammit, I need to give it away. I think I could do a bang-up job of helping a *lot* of people if I had a lot of money.
(Sure, I can help even without the money -- but the money would mean I could do so much more!)
--
--
Don't like it? Respond with words, not karma.
If you're writing software purely for the love of doing so, just release it anonymously as public domain... in later years, after getting a better contract or deciding to strike out on your own, you can just pretend to discover it on the internet and use it in GPL/BSD/proprietary software with your name on it.
Lisa introduced him to recycling things to get change. Before long, he'd opened up a recycling plant and was again the richest man in town. Of course, he also turned sinister and devised a contraption to "sweep the sea clean" by catching fish in a huge net of six pack rings.
--
Vidi, Vici, Veni
If Hotline isn't "peer to peer", then nothing is, including Napster and 'Doze's file sharing.
P2P isn't the opposite of client-server. It's more about dynamic servers that come and go, such that no static database can keep track of them.
---
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
Isn't that the whole point? Weed out the bad employers. If they aren't open to negotiation, then they're not people.
---
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
If you need any help for spending a few billions on *good* things, send me a mail!
/max
-- It's always darker before it goes pitch black.
Though I recall hearing about this before, I can't seem to figure out what the problem is. (I know there is one...)
He wrote Hotline, he worked for HCL, who he assigned all rights of hotline to, and then he left the company.....
and now he has no rights to Hotline, but the company does...
If we had something like the AMA, I would find another profession.
Take as one example (not to takes sides on this, but just to point out the kinds of things that would certainly happen in our industry), the 60 minutes story of one doctor who was removed from medical practice by the AMA....
His patients were the sort who suffered chronic, debilitating pain the likes of which you and I are not likely to be able to empathize with. He found that perscribing large doses of narcotics (e.g. opiates and the like) helped these people live normal lives, and according to his results and all of the research available, such patients were seemingly immune to the addictive properties that the recreational users of these drugs were subject to. Apparently, the feedback loop that causes addiction is somehow interfered with by the using the drugs to relieve chronic pain. Who knew.
Instead of holding this man on a pedistal for finding a way to let his patients live relatively normal lives, the doctor had his license revoked and at least one of his patients, unable to face the debilitating pain again, killed themselves.
No, paperwork standardization is one thing, but I don't want or need ethical oversight.
What that sounds like to me is you need a Union.
Unions have a whole lot of baggage that I don't think this industry needs. A stripped-down sort of union might be nice. The problem is, I don't want to be constrained to do business the way everyone else does, I just want to get some paperwork standardized so that companies don't get spooked every time I hand back their IP agreements with loads of red-marker.
If you want to call the organization that produces that document a union, fine, but I have no interest in standardized pay scales; time off; benefits; etc, because I'm in a position trade on my skillset for what I want. I'd have to step down in all of those areas in order to get standardization across the industry. Clearly not a win.
How about something like the AMA? Would that work for you? If you organized well paid people you could seriously effect government policies just like the doctors, lawyers, and the CEOs do.
War is necrophilia.
Just like to say I have done work for his Dad and Paul is perhaps one of the nicest people I've ever met. Only knew Adam as the son who had better things to do than maintain the code he wrote for his old man (not that I can talk).
How we know is more important than what we know.
No matter, I think that this kid made the same mistake that most large corporations make w.r.t. IP. He assumed that he could own an idea, and at the same time tell someone about it. The fact is that you get to do one or the other. Once an idea is shared, you can't ever take it back. In fact, the benefactor of this sharing can't give it back no matter how hard he tries.
I think that if Adam Hinkley really wanted to keep the code that he worked on, while employed by someone else, he should have released it under GPL. But because he tried to keep ownership of it w/out the resources to defend that ownership, he lost it completely.
Key to financial independence: Spend less than you earn. Save and invest the difference. Do it for a long time.
This may be changing given the recent economic situation, but last I heard there were still more tech jobs open than qualified people to fill them. As a prospective employee, you do have leverage; just as the company can tell you to go away, you can seek employment at another company with more reasonable policies. Adopting the attitude that you have no negotiating power is likely to become a self-fulfilling prophecy.
How to solve most of our problems: 1.Lots of nuclear plants. 2.Cure aging.
That accurately describes the standard Western European time metaphor. The model that we use is that we're standing on a time line, walking forward as time elapses. That's why we say "it was a long way ahead" referring to a span of time, or we are "forward looking" if we think about the future and "backward looking" if we think about the past, and it's why we "face the future".
If you think about it, the time metaphor that we use doesn't make sense. You can't see into the future, but you can see into the past. That's why some cultures (from memory, and I could be wrong about this, Chinese and some Australian Aboriginal cultures do this) have as their metaphor that you're walking along a time line backwards. Presumably in their buzzword-laden corporate cultures, if they have them, someone who looks to the future is "backward-looking". :-)
sub f{($f)=@_;print"$f(q{$f});";}f(q{sub f{($f)=@_;print"$f(q{$f});";}f});
"Give a poor man a million dollars, he will remain a poor man. Take away a million dollars from a rich man, he will make another million dollars. "
What a nasty unpleasant and largely untrue saying that is.
And what an unthinking reaction that is. One only has to look at the large number of lottery winners who end up deeply in debt after the money is gone, and the large number of entrepreneurs who bounce back after losing everything, to know that the saying is, in fact, quite true. Whether it's unpleasant and nasty might depend on whether you're a poor man who thinks getting a million dollars is going to make him rich.
--
Someone you trust is one of us.
What you've proposed here looks pretty similar to the IP agreements that I've seen in the past with one notable exception. It seems commonplace for the company to stipulate that any inventions that are the result of knowledge gained from your work belong to the company regardless of when or where work on this project took place. When applied to physical objects this seems to make sense, but it gets kind of fuzzy when you start talking about software developers. At my job I write software that interfaces with hardware components and networking protocols. If I were to completely eliminate those areas from my choices of personal projects I'm really not left with much in the way of useful software. The one consolation that I have is that I develop DOS and Windows software at work and play with Linux and PalmOS in my free time. I hope that the platform differences will be sufficient to distance my personal projects from my work should any disagreement arise.
_____________
I don't want free as in beer. I just want free beer.
"...Justice Harper concluded that Adam Hinkley and his father had breached Redrock's rights over the AppWarrior class libraries, but because it was "innocent", the plaintiff should not be able to seek damages against Paul Hinkley..."
Wow! Amazing! A judge that considers intent, not just the hard line of the law. We see that even though Adam did violate the terms of employment, he had no intent to cause harm to the plaintiff, and probably minimal harm was done.
This case is not unlike the kid who brings a tin of Altoids to school and gets kicked out under the drugs "zero tolerance" (read: zero common sense) policy for having something that looks like the real thing.
Or, like the time I got pulled over for speeding, the state cop told me "you weren't doing anything dangerous, you were just breaking the law." Granted, I deserved the ticket and had no grounds to object, but it still burns me that he said that .
--Jon
Give me my freedom, and I'll take care of my own security, thank you.
Releasing the software under GPL could get you into some interesting legal trouble. If your employer legally owns the rights to the software, how can you legally release it under GPL. It might be taken as giving away something that doesn't belong to you. I'm not sure what this means to the thousands of people working on GPLed software in their free time, but I suspect there are a lot of people violating their employment agreements.
wow! you ever waited tables? There isn't a lot of "free time to think over problems"
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DO NOT DISTURB THE SE
No offense, johnos... I'm not trying to call you a liar. But if you don't know Hinkley, then that means you presumably weren't around when all this went down; you're a new guy. So what makes you think that you really heard the full story from your employer? I'm not saying that Hinkley reacted correctly; obviously he didn't. But I don't think he thought he was going to get a better deal; I think he felt he was losing control (or had already lost control) of the company.
;-)
And the false promises that Roks and others made to Hinkley, LONG before your time at HLC, are quite relevant to this.
Ok, I have to get in one little dig - I hope you're looking for a new job, because it doesn't look like HLC has much of a business model these days!
-- "Those who cast the votes decide nothing. Those who count the votes decide everything." -Joseph Stalin
His job advice seems a bit naive to me. I have to work so I can afford to have the spare time to work on my own stuff. I don't I will ever have the time and the resources short of my retirement to be able to just "hold off" writting my own software. You just have to be really specific in your employment agreements about what is yours and what is the companies. His statement about everything in writting makes its point here. Make sure your employer agrees that anything you write on your own time and on your own systems is yours. And also don't write software that would compete, that helps too.
I work at Hotline Communications. You can judge my comments with that in mind. I am NOT speaking as a representative of Hotline Communications. these are my personal opinions.
I am very familiar with all of the issues in the case. I have met all the main players, except Adam Hinkley himself.
I find it hard to believe the bullshit that I have seen in these comments. Many of the "facts" cited here are entirely made up. For example, Hotline was ruined by the PC port. Most of the work on the pc port was done by Adam Hinkley himself. He did not leave because he was opposed to banner ads, or because he disagreed with the way the company was going, or because greedy investors threw him out, or even because he was homesick. The death of his sister, tragic though that may have been, was entirely irrelevant. He left, and took the source with him, because he wanted a better deal. He did not feel that anyone else should own any more of "his" product. Even if they were investing money in its development. He wanted complete control, in perpituity.
Keep this in mind. When he left, he was the President of the company and its majority shareholder. He had a seat on the board and a veto over any change in ownership structure. Nobody had the power to take anything away from Adam. He WAS the company.
Read the judgement. It confirms what I have always thought. Adam Hinkley screwed everyone he ever had a chance to screw. Including his own father.
Greed was indeed the problem here. But it was Adam Hinkley's greed, not that of his business partners' that was the real issue. Sorry, but if you want corporate bullys, you will have to look somewhere else.
Quite right. I've just got my company to sign a waiver for a project I'm about to start coding for. They did remind me about a clause in my contract that says that I must not have any outside interests that interfere with the efficient running of the company, but that does at least make both our positions clear.
If you're thinking of writing some code outside of company hours, then ask for a waiver. Resist the temptation to code when you don't have one, especially if you've asked for a waiver and they've refused. They're almost certain to demand the IP later, especially if it's beginning to get somewhere.
-- "This is the Space Age, and we are Here To Go" - W.S.Burroughs
1. Always give in to those that are accepted as more powerful and never fight the system. Let them win because they have the money, and money always wins! Don't attempt to change it because you can't. (Or, if you would rather, you can follow my personal philosophy, which is very similar to the Golden Rule, which is to act accordingly - trust until given a reason not to trust, like until given a reason not to like; it's that "live and let live" philosophy. Of course, you could always do it your way, which is what I really recommend. Use your own judgment. All businessmen aren't the same, no matter how many people try to convince you otherwise. There are honorable people in this world.)
2. Don't do it... Short-cuts or easy ways are like cheating, and you need to work to earn your keep, you know? (Honorable; I don't really disagree.)
3. Trust no one! Always trust no one! You cannot trust anyone! (Back to my "live and let live" philosophy - I'll trust someone until they give me a good reason not to trust them, and then I'll react accordingly.)
4. Very good advice. This can be backed up by words from John Stuart Mill in his political/philosophical essay, On Liberty, in which he asserted:
Though [one's] opinion be an error, it may, and very commonly does, contain a portion of truth; and since the general or prevailing opinion on any subject is rarely or never the whole truth, it is only by the collision of adverse opinions that the remainder of the truth has any chance of being supplied.
In other words, no single source of information has the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. Another quote from a good friend of mine - "There is only one absolute truth: this is absolutely true" - meaning there is no absolute truth to any situation. The only way you can go about finding the best "truth" for any situation is to vary your sources of information. Excellent advice, that #4 was, I say.
Hinckley then goes on to say how easy it is for someone to fall into those traps, "even after someone warned you." Judging by that statement, he would assume that I would be one of the first to fall into one of those traps. Maybe he's right. Maybe not. We know without the experience to back it up.
The best advice anyone can offer on any situation, really, is to research it well and use your best judgment, and use caution.
And finally... I wish the best of luck to anyone losing their own rights and freedoms simply because the big businesses have the resources to take them.
(Interestingly, this is one of those situations that I have seen organizations such as the ACLU playing both sides. One month the ACLU sides with a company suing an employee for the employee's off-the-clock work, and the next month the ACLU sides with an employee being sued by his company. I wonder how those standards work...)
Yoru Nazi example may not be restricted unless it can be shown that this is an order to kill those Jews. Recently, there was an appeals court case that may be on point. This case ruled that putting the names of abortion doctors were could not be actionable. Even though this was linked to a death.
Fight Spammers!
Fight Spammers!
I am really unable to see how this would work. It is a great idea, but if it was just you and some others that started handing these to prospective employers, they simply wouldn't hire you. I don't work in the computer industry at all so I cannot claim do know exactly how it works, but I have trouble imagining a company signing something like this unless it was drawn up by their lawyers, and allowed them to exploit the situation in their interests, and not the employee. After all, they are the ones that hold all of the cards. You are just a prospective employee, and there are plenty of them around that won't tell them they have to sign this document... Not to say that this isn't a really good idea. I just feel that you cannot offer something like this for an employer to voluntarily sign on an individual-employee basis. Why would they do something like this unless they absolutely had to? If you were part of a computer industy-wide union, it would be different. If it was in a union/company contract, then it would be manditory that the company sign it upon hiring you or anybody else. I am guessing that a vast majority of people in the computer industry probably do not want to be unionized, and that is fine. I am not saying that it is the only way or even the best way to go. I just don't think that you can get something like this accepted without that amount of bargaining power to back you up.--
I noticed that too and was most unhappy with his statement: "Do not write other code, not even in your spare time." So I'm supposed to not scratch my itch until I quit? I don't think so. I'll just make sure that my contract says that any code I write in my time on my machines is mine. Any company that refuses to accept that isn't one I'd want to work for anyway.
--
Dyolf Knip
Or at least buffed.
Sorry.
___
__
Do ya feel happy-go-lucky, punk?
The point is, if you are making your income else where, then why the need to "make more money", rather than just share and "make people happy".
Perhaps our priorties are going askew? Just my $.02
If we don't make light of everything, we are just stumbling in the dark - Blank
It wasn't until a certain Canadian member *cough*jr*cough*, convinced Hinkley that if he were to come to Toronto, and sell his soul to the Devil, he would be made rich, rich, RICH! It was only later that "investors" were brought in (I put that in quotes because investors actually give you funds, and clearly these guys had not.)
In summary, Blame Canada!
To all the young and upcoming programmers out there, please accept my advice following, I think you would be wise to read it carefully.
1. Employment: NEVER write your own software while you are an employee of someone else, EVEN if you do it in your own time
Well when the hell are we supposed to do it then? I can't live without my job, how am I supposed to support myself? I can see this for students or people who still live with their parents, but for young programmers like me, just out of school, it's not possible to work for ourselves. We just don't have the resources.
What would solve this problem? Well, first of all, less draconian IP agreements with our employers. I don't see that happening for the majority of people, so how about some more applied schoolwork to help young people get a portfolio together. With a reasonable portfolio the young programmers could help negotiate better terms for themselves upon entry into the job market. I had something like this because of extensive involvement in outside projects at college and things on my resume like published papers which made me more attractive to my company so I could negotiate terms of employment. Very few other graduates have this, primarially because of lack of programs/encouragement on the part of educators.
Steven
-- I have marked myself unwilling to moderate-- I don't have other accounts to artificially inflate the karma of
Sir, you are correct. The setting is under "Customize Homepage", and after hitting the save button, all dates were in the new format.
You can't change previous posts, but I'd like to change it to (I'm getting annoyed at only using the month and the day as a date stamp on Slashdot posts - how short sighted of me not to investigate all the customization options, before criticizing the editors. You can really make a fool out of yourself if you don't try hard enough.)
I only wish someone would have pointed this out yesterday, so more Slashdotters could have seen it...
Knowing the trustworthiness of the people you are dealing with is key. You should trust them and price yourself based on trustworthiness. Ask people who have done business with them before! Ask the boards! For expensive decisions, you need something in writing. In general, if the value of what you are trying to protect multiplied by the percentage expectation of getting screwed is less than the considerable cost of getting the legal-work done plus the intangible cost of the implicit "I don't trust you that much", then don't bother. Some of these work out, some don't.
Also note that almost all Fortune 500 executives demand written employment contracts from their firms. Even though these firms are reasonably trustworthy (due to reputation concerns), the amount at stake is so high that the executives need the protection. This same basic calculation applies to everyone.
Some agreements are so commonly documented that the failure to get a written agreement is cause for concern: consulting gigs and stock options spring to mind.
In response to the specific article, I would recommend that anyone taking on a partner in a business get a lawyer. A partner includes any other owner or creditor in a small business. There are way too many obscure ways to get screwed to not have a lawyer. A single innocuous-sounding word change in a vanilla document can effectively transfer all ownership in the company's assets from you to them (ie. the deletion of "to my knowledge"). Lawyers know these tricks and watch out for them.
Milo
What a nasty unpleasant and largely untrue saying that is.
Phil
Either:
Hmmmm. Sounds a lot like being a writer or a musician. =)
--
-- Geof F. Morris
"What a nasty unpleasant and largely untrue saying that is."
I'm not so sure... My father and I have discussed this a couple of times, with regards to the lottery. Anecdotal evidence (and his professional experience as a bankruptcy accountant) suggests that not insignificant proportion of people who win a substantial lottery, ~$1e6, fairly rapidly lose most or all of it.
Our conjecture is that if they were in financial straits to start with, it may have been due to their inability to manage their finances. That doesn't change when given a large sum of money, it just takes a little bit longer to fritter it all away.
But, this is all hearsay, anecdotes and conjecture. I'd be very interested in solid stats on the finanical status of people >5 years after winning a lottery.
-----
D. Fischer
ShoutingMan.com
Why not do what farmers in the 19th century did? They were an individualistic bunch, worked hard, believed they were the backbone of American society, and got screwed by railroad companies with a transport monopoly and banks with a finance monopoly.
They solution was to combine forces and form their own democratically owned distribution channel -- farmer's marketing cooperatives. Their combined financial resources and market clout were able to accomplish what they could not do individually. See www.cooperative.org for more info..
If your children ever found out how lame you are, they'd murder you in your sleep
It is easy to decide to write software, but what is far more difficult to write quality software that your empoyers would not want. In the end, I chose technologies which I new to be unpopular in my workplace, and I got permission to do so in writing. The idea was to make it difficult to challenge my rights, and at the same time make them unlikely to want to do so.
Anyway, the lesson is always get permission in writing and, if possible write software which might be outstanding but which your employers won't see its quality.
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP
He does not really suggest any proper solution to the problem of writing your own software- don't do it for yourself, don't do it for the company you work for... one can only assume he expects us to all start our own companies. However the idea of a company is to join together a group of people so that (usually) a product is produced more effectively and quickly- it is a joint effort rather than one by yourself.
However his second point is against funding. How are we meant to start these companies of our own if we can't fund them? Unless we already have a large capital it is nearly impossible to start one's own business without it.
I understand that clearly what has happened is unfortunate, but the guidelines set seem somewhat irrational given the realities it is trying to overcome.
Sorry if this is getting off-topic but ... since when is Hotline "peer-to-peer"?
While Hotline appears to work on the old 'client-server' rote, it's much more similiar to a BBS system. The only difference between Hotline and something like Napster is that the file and server are integrated in the Napster application. Both programs contain all the features we see in 'mature' P2P apps such as chat, file x-change, etc..
The next Slashdot story will be ready soon, but subscribers can beat the rush and slashdot the links early!
This is a very old story and not as cut and dried as this meta-post makes out.
IIRC he sold the software, got a job and a share otion from the purchaser, when the project came good, he wanted it his own way and left to start his own company & took the only copy of the source with him. And tried to claim he sold them something else. I think he got what he deserved.
If your really interested I suggest using your fav search engine to dig up the other side.
In the event that you have an IP assignment contract, you can always try to get the company to sign a waiver. The GNU people do this, when someone joins an official GNU project. They have forms, etc, all prepared for that purpose...
To start with, if they were financially provident, they wouldn't have been buying lottery tickets in the first place. You get better odds from a Mafia bookie than from a gov't run lottery (at least in the USA) -- not that bookies are a wise investment strategy either...
Sorry, it should read: Give a foolish man a million dollars, he will remain a poor man. Take away a million dollars from a wise man, he will make another million dollars. - anotherwords, he's not lazy and will work hard to make the million back. I guess I'm slaughtering the exact saying, but the point remains the same.
Nobody quote me, but based on my amateur opinion, I believe he is free to write anything he wants. He stated that there are no longer any noncompete agreements effective, so the only restriction that I think remains is that he can't start with any of his old source code. As long as the source is not duplicated, he should be ok.
Now the skeptic in my has to comment. If he chooses to write competing software, or participate in a similar effort, the companies that were party to this suite could choose to take him back to court, accusing him of copyright infringement. While we know that this kind of case would ultimately be dismissed, we have to remember that the companies have far more financial resources than he, and could therefore drag things through the legal muck enough to force him to comply due to lack of resources -- which is pretty much what happened in this ruling.
GreyPoopon
--
Why is it I can write insightful comments but can't come up with a clever signature?
At first blush I see two alternatives for individuals who would like to pursue individual projects while employed by a company which may have financial interest in such independant intellectual property. The first alternative is to release all projects under the GPL license. Employers are not likely to be interested in products they cannot make proprietary, and if they are there is nothing to prevent you from continuing to develop and support your version. The major drawback, of course, is that there is no money in GPL projects. If your motivation is profit rather than creativity then this is not a viable option. Furthermore, if your employer is vicious enough they could claim in court that you did not have the right to release the project under the GPL and you would be out of luck anyway. The second option is akin to a pre-nuptual agreement. Make the employer sign an agreement that you have a right to all IP created on your own time. The agreement should state that the employer will not make any effort to gain control of such IP. In my experience, employers who have not been involved in IP cases rarely give such issues thought and are likley to sign such an agreement. If they refuse to do so, get another job. I could not imagine working for a company who refuses to agree not to attempt to cheat me at some future date.
Now I may sound like an old fart - which I guess I am at 30 - but from you comments it seems that most of you have a lot to learn about business in general and software publishing in particular.
I see a lot of misconceptions here, so let's start with the biggest one right away:
It seems that most of the people commenting on the story think that the "idea" is the main thing in getting a software company up and running. Not so! As a rule of thumb, the idea is 5% of the program. The program is 5% of the product. The product is 5% of the company. In other words: While it's certaintly true that without the idea there would be no company, it's AT LEAST as true to say that without a lot of (non-idea and programming related) work there would be no company either.
Coders tend to underestimate the importance of the supporting organization and the networking involved in getting a product to the shelves, not to mention selling it once it's in the stores. It's true that a lot of barriers have fallen in this area over the last years, but the main part of the job is still to get the software ready for the market, and actually getting it TO the market. In other words you (OK, we) tend to overestimate the value of ideas.
In the area of ideas: You do NOT need a brilliant idea (although it won't hurt). You need a good idea and a good plan. Without a plan you'll get exactly nowhere. Have you thought about distribution? PR? User segments? Competition? You NEED to think about those things, in order to find a way to package your IP in a product that will actually stand a chance of making money.
The last major misconception is in the area of the nature of business deals. It seems that a lot of people are outraged that he got "screwed over". Well guess what: People do not do business in order to be nice to eachother! They are out there to make money, and if you do not make sure that your ass is covered, the easiest way to make money will be to "screw you over". That would be your fault for not getting a good lawyer to check out the contract before you signed it, and not their fault for being evil capitalists. If you don't want to deal with capitalists, don't invite them in. If you don't want to deal with them, and your product needs financing to take off, your plan wasn't good enough :) In that case, bite the bullit and cross your fingers, 'cause there's no way to make sure that they can't screw you over somehow.
Finally you absolutely have to quit your day job in order to give your own idea the 110% attention it needs in order to become a moneymaker. You can NOT expect to make a fortune in your spare time. Actually your prospective investors expect that you spend at least half a year working on your idea ON YOUR OWN DIME... If you don't, well then you haven't shown sufficient confidence in your own ideas, right? They supply the resources, but you have to make them bellieve in you somehow.
To sum it up: Don't bitch - learn about the facts of business before you try to play in the big (or middle) leagues. Unfortunately the only reliable way to learn about business it to try it, so expect to get burnt once or twice. But it's no big deal.... You'll learn, and eventually (hopefully) you'll bag the big one some day.
Just don't count on doing it through amazing code alone, or expect that the venture capitalists are in the fairy godmother business.
Not true. I insisted on something very much like that in my most recent contract. It depends how much they want you, and for tech people with any skill at all, remember you're in the driver's seat. Think of this little freedom as a benefit the company can give you for free. If you had two equivalent offers but one of them explicitly acknowledged your rights to your off hours, non-company related work, which one would you choose? In my case, and I think this is a technique that will work generally, I said that I was involved in a number of open-source projects and I needed written assurance that my employer would not make any claim on the work I was doing there. Since your employer is most probably benefitting from the open source work you're doing you'll find it an easy argument to make, and it doesn't sound like you're planning to run off with the company's IP. Finally, if you don't ask, you won't get.
--
Life's a bitch but somebody's gotta do it.
Would the court decision keep him from taking what he has learned in the process of writing the programs he had stolen from him and using that knowledge to write something better that does something similar? Prehaps somebody in the opensource camp should hire him on as a programmer and consultant. Gnutella and all the other P2P solutions I've seen need a lot of work to become viable - may as well hire someone with experience. RedHat and other big vendors should realize that P2P will be important to capturing the desktop market.
At what price learning? At what cost wisdom? The price is a man's peace of mind, and the cost is his life.
I am just sorry that he learned them the hard way. If you, (Mr/Ms) Slashdot reader, read no other story today, please read Adam's four warnings. Understanding or at least accepting them can literally change your life as a techie.
As somebody else once said, "This is no-shit serious".
Give a poor man a million dollars, he will remain a poor man.
A scary number like 80%+ of all large-prize lottery winners go bankrupt within a few years. Most have no understanding of how to make that money work for them, or to turn it into a renewable resource through wise investment. They spend the $100k/year, even selling the future years' checks before they come in.
[
Well this version is considerably less unpleasant than the first.
Although like that other US saying to be found in many bars "if you are so clever why ain't you rich", I would have to say that if a man was wise perhaps he would have no need for a million dollars.
Phil
At least he has the consolation that he is young enough to start again. Brilliant people are never short of ideas.
It is just gutting when your sole vision in life for 5 years is cruelly crushed by large non-feeling corporate entities. But what do you do? Join them, or go against them?
Furthermore, I think young people need to get together when they have the advantage (when still in HS) with their intellectual property, and form a corporation with a collective structure of the inventors making decisions, so they can leverage a bit more decisionmaking power with their IP.
when you are a kid, you would probably be more likely to share the profits a bit if it would enable you to act as an adult with your property through this corporation, rather than getting taken advantage of at a young age.
Goat sex free since 2001
Next a few things to ponder upon:
Adam Hinkley sold the rights to his code. He did this without duress & in an apparently legal fashion. He took the money (ok, stock too.)
Later he disagreed with the direction the company who had bought his code was going. Fair enough, it's not unusual for an inventor/founder to become unhappy with the future course of their product, particularly when they've sold control of it.
However Hinkley's solution was to encrypt the source-code for the application & refuse to release it to those who had paid for it. Now I don't know about the rest of you but had I paid someone some large sum of money for the rights to a product then employed them under contract to extend the product I would expect it to be mine. Again Hinkley took the money.
Later (as I recall) it is discovered that Hinkley had apparently misappropriated OTHER code that he'd been previously hired to develop by a previous employer, renaming & reusing it without their permission.
I don't know how other folks view this but when most companies hire someone to write code they expect it to belong to them, not to wander out the door with the employee.
Generally this is clearly spelt out in the employment contract and yes generally the folks who paid for the code get to determine it's license, if any. Sure skills & techniques & code snippets & even architecture go with the employee but not the whole ball-of-wax, line by line to be used in another companies' product.
Yes Adam suffered some devastating personal events. However none of those have any direct bearing on his being compos mentis and signing contracts. At some point one has to take responsibility for one's decisions, for ill or for good.
Finally note that Adam did not do this all without advice. His father assisted him in the decisions, was involved in running his business, and they did hire lawyers to help write & review the legal instruments.
Adam had every opportunity to refuse to sign the paperwork, to demand things be put in writing, to simply not go ahead with the deal. However he didn't. He sold his product.
Frankly it all reads to me as a greedy young man who had a good idea, sold it, then when he realized he'd lost control regretted it & attempted to renege on his obligations. It's great that he was so committed to the product, a pity he'd sold away his control of it. That the courts have not backed him up is not surprising, he has shown little reason for them to do so.
What's the lesson to be learned from all of this?
- Be legally smart.
- Understand what one is getting into.
- Realize that when something is sold it no longer belongs to you.
- Understand that one can't later renounce contracts.
- Accept that there are no legal 'outs' for personal disaster; distraction & grief are not sufficient to invalidate one's commitments.
- Respect that if one is capable of signing a contract one is expected to honor that contract.
- Take responsabilty for one's actions and fulfill ones obligations.
After Adam Hinkley sold his product to Hotline he was no longer it's owner. This was trivially clear beforehand whether he recognized it himself or not. That the company may have different goals & directions for Adam's product should have occurred to him earlier & provisions been made. Without those he was simply another employee with a valued position, a paycheck & a block of stock. To attempt to then hold material hostage in order dictate terms to the new owners was stupid & illegal. To attempt to remove the materials to another jurisdiction was even more stupid. That the legitimate owners of the material were forced to bring in the law & have a search made to return their property was sad but justified - the code was theirs as much as any other corporate asset, physical or intellectual.Sob stories make for interesting reading but aren't particularly compelling. Perhaps next time Adam will have matured a bit & treat going into business with the seriousness it requires, respect the implications of signing a contract.
Finally, here's the only source-material I could find: HL Afterbirth.
I don't read ACs: If a post isn't worth so much as a nom de plume to its author then I wont bother either.
It's been a while, so I don't remember the particulars of this case exactly.
Adam was a kid who wrote hotline, a very sophisticated client/server filetransfer/chat app, which very quickly was picked up by the warez community. It was light years ahead of anything in the field (this was 3(?) years before Napster, to put things in perspective).
Due to the popularity, a group of businessmen decided to fund further development of the app...Adam joined them, signing over his code. He moved to canada and worked on the project. Eventually, though, he realized that the business people were screwing him over. After trying, naively, to get them to change their ways, they reminded him of the contracts he had signed regarding his code. Adam suddenly realized that he no longer 'owned' his code. To make a story short, he PGP encrypted everything on the computer he was using and flew back to .au.
The company was forced to reverse-engineer hl, resulting in version 1.6 (1.7?) or so, which included banner ads and a PC version. This was the death knell of the hotline community, which finally degenerated to the land of w4r3z kiddies it is today.
And now, at 22, Adam's ready to take on the business world again. Go Adam! Kick some ass!
We really need someone who knows the law to draw up a document. I'm thinking of a non-disclosure/non-compete that we can all offer to prospective employers. Here's what I think needs to go into it:
1. Information and inventions that you are exposed to at work are property of the company, and will not be disclosed without permission.
2. External projects will be performed only off-site unless you are instructed otherwise. No company resources will be used.
3. Off-hours work and inventions are your own.
4. If you're asked to deploy your own off-hours software for business, changes made will be contributed back to the project under the terms of that project's license.
5. In terms of non-competition, software that is used by a competitor, but which does not directly engage in the business of your company will not be considered to be a violation.
Having this, we could then present this to prospective businesses in order to take the pressure off of them to come up with a way to cover their asses. They get a document which the industry has had a chance to review an comment on so that they know what to expect.
Thoughts?
This is true - your best ideas will probably come while you are young and in school, and working for a corporation will narrow your explorations, and probably steal your best ideas. If you want to make the big dough, and don't mind taking the big risk, start your own company.
Having said that, I still believe post-college is the way to go. If you fail, or the industry collaspes, you will have a degree to fall back on. If you suceed, you will have at least sat through the mandatory lectures, so that you won't get lectured on Slashdot on proper list creation, database design, or basic security.
Roblimo wrote an article earlier today that showed some real business knowledge in the minds behind Slashdot. They've been at this game for a while, and now do what they love for a living. It would be nice to have a series of articles, something like "Business for Nerds, Stuff that Doesn't Seem to Matter But Actually Does", and make it a linked column, rather than a Slashdot post, so that it doesn't get lost in the archives. Something like the FAQ, but updated, and with years (I'm getting annoyed at only using the month and the day as a date stamp on Slashdot posts - how short sighted).
When it first started, Hotline was a great app. It was probably one of the first peer2peer sharing applications that one could reliably find MP3's on. It was the first peer2peer application that I ever used, at any rate.
It was great at the time, because you didn't have to do the hunt and peck thing with Hotline, or beg for rare tracks on usenet. You could find what you want, frequently by the server's name and/or theme, and then try to upload in response.
Of course, getting a stable version out for Win32 destroyed this rather friendly exchange for the same reason that all of AOL's millions of users make it difficult to use what would otherwise be a pretty good service. People began to use Hotline to try to make money and run scams. Most HL servers, I suspect, are fronts for banner schemes now. These schemes are probably seen by advertisers as part of the primary reasons why the banner market is so unsafe.
I find it ironic that the application's creator was screwed over for the same reason that it's users were: GREED.
I'm glad that he didn't pursue. I don't think it would have been worth his time. Personally, I hope he starts out and creates another great, innovative, killer app.
The next Slashdot story will be ready soon, but subscribers can beat the rush and slashdot the links early!