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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.
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!
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.
The point is, this guy seems to be very intelligent, so I'm sure he can move on with his life and do quite well for himself. Looks as if youthful enthusiasm has now been tempered with the cold steel edge of the real world. Although his message is a little jaded, he seems to have adjusted well to the change, all things considered. Good luck, buddy!