Slashdot Mirror
Company Ownership of Employee Ideas
Anonymous Coward writes "Alcatel USA Inc. filed a lawsuit, and won, in a bid to claim proprietary rights for a software idea of one of its former employees, Evan Brown. Evan signed a invention disclosure agreement with his former employers but what makes this case unusual is that Evan never wrote anything down with regards to his idea, meaning that Alcatel seems to be claiming rights to an idea in his head. Does this mean your thoughts may belong to your company? Maybe...." This story has been kicking around for a few days but this is the first legal analysis I've seen of it. Watch what you sign!
J adds:
see also
recent TR story
and
our 1999 story.
That said, I think he got screwed. Where's the EFF for this guy? Shouldn't they take up his cause?
Evan has since decided to terminate his employment with Alcatel. But a court has ruled that his head must remain until the patent on it expires.
They even seem to be legally required to state that such is the case, or at least every contract i've signed has a footnote after the clause describing the state law.
This Space Intentionally Left Blank
At my last three jobs, I have conveniently "forgotten" to submit a signed copy of the document that lets them own everything I create. For years now I've hated the idea that anything I do while employed (even if it's not work related) could be taken away from me.
I write (or should say, wrote) magazine articles as a freelance writer in my spare time. Despite the fact that I always wrote these from home, the current Intelectual Property contracts in Australia would have meant that my employer owned my words - not ideal.
Despite having failed to submit signed copies of these contracts for 3 jobs in a row (over a 4 year period, no less), I've never been hassled over it.
I guess my point is this: don't sign it if you don't agree with it. Sure, you might not get the job, but think of the implications if your "hobby" becomes an overnight hit!
As a side point, imagine how the guys from id would have felt if they had been forced to hand over their revolutionary 3D game engines to their employer at the time, simply because they thought of the ideas while sitting on the toilet at the office.
You honestly think the contract he signed said "we own the rights to all inventions and THOUGHTS you may create during your employment here, even if you have created no inventions during your employment and only THOUGHT about creating said invention and actually did so only AFTER leaving the company"...?
I really doubt that occurred.
If he CREATED something, that's one thing. By your logic, any business I created after leaving employment somewhere would actually belong to my former employer. Say, I work for Intel... and I decide to start a coffee shop that specializes in cookies and donuts too... I started dreaming about doing that since about two years into my employment with intel... but now that I've left the company and started my business, all of my products and business belong to them becuase I dreamt/thought/planned it during my employment?
What about industry? Certainly you shouldn't be excepted to adhere to the contract if you work for Advance Micro Devices making motherboards and your invention has to do with a way to improve lipstick - your employer should have NO claim to your invention since it in no way had anything whatsoever to do with your employment or even your employers industry.
Further, what if you wrote a book and published it? Say a mystery novel...
As they say, the man who represents himself has a fool for a client.
The contract was probably signed with the understanding that work that was actually done would be owned by the company. That's standard. In this case, they're trying to own what the employee thinks. What I'd like to know is how they know what his invention is? If it isn't recorded anywhere, what's to prevent him from giving them part of it? What's to prevent them from saying that he didn't give it all, and to keep badgering him until everything he ever thought is their property?
I can't say that I don't give a fuck. I've just run out of fuck to give.
First of all, if you signed that agreement, everything you do at work is theirs.
If you want to do something on your own time, you have to take precautions. It might not be convenient, but you'll thank yourself when your old company can't come after the business you just started.
1) Keep a detailed journal. In fact, keep two journals, one for the things you do at work and another for the things you do at home. There shouldn't be much common between them.
2) Buy your own equipment and development tools. You can't use their computer, their copy of Visual Studio, their ciruit fab machine, whatever. Anything you make, that you want to be totally yours, must be done on your own dollar. Don't even use their workspace, or their email system, or their internet pipe.
3) Make sure you fully understand the intellectual property agreements, and have a copy of the one you signed. If you break any part of the contract, you don't have a leg to stand on.
I know everyone wants to be friends with their old company, happy memories etc., but this is business. If they think you are taking a chunk out of their dollar, they will come after you. Play it safe, or be sorry.
...
I strongly disagree with this sort "we own your mind" nonsense, but it is common. Every company I've worked for, in several fields, has made me sign the same kind of document.
The courts rightly recognized that employees should not be able to withhold potentially valuable ideas from their employer, specifically against their employee agreement. Whether the ideas are committed to practice, or written on paper, is irrelevant. He had an idea valuable to his employer, tried to get extra money from it, and when he didn't get an offer good enough, he refused to disclose the idea. What a horrible precedent it would set if Brown had won.
Pinker was absolutely right when he said:
Technology companies are in the business of inventing, and if people are doing it on their own behalf and take it for themselves from the company, the company is not going to stay in business long.
Also vital is this passage:
Lewis believes Brown could have helped his case had he kept an idea log, as inventors do in the patent arena. Establishing that Brown had the idea years before coming to DSC would have contradicted the signed agreement and gone a long way toward establishing Brown's credibility.
Heed his warning. Brown has a tough case to fight, but kudos to him for 'sticking to his guns'. I predict, however, he will lose.
The court also held that, pursuant to the contract, the company owned full legal right, title and interest to what Henderson called Brown's "solution," which he defined as the process and method developed by Brown for converting machine-executable binary code into high-level source code; reverse-engineering the intelligence from existing programs and recoding it into high-level language; and converting certain machine code into C language source.
Excellent! Alcatel won the right to violate the DMCA!
"Mod, mod, mod...and another troll bites the dust."
According to the article, Brown was fired when the product was still an idea. Since then, he's done development without any support from Alcatel, not on their time, etc. How can they presume that they should own his work? Is all the work I do from now on the property of my former employers?
I can't say that I don't give a fuck. I've just run out of fuck to give.
One lesson from this is: if you do something "on your own time", don't talk about it to your company; you can always publish it after quitting and nobody can prove anything. Furthermore, in certain special circumstances, if you do need an exception from a company's IP policy, get it in writing before you sign the employment contract.
Why companies get away with forcing these contracts on workers is hard to understand. They hire consultants that do not fall under such restrictions and pay them more to boot. Furthermore, in many states and countries, there are limitations on such claims by employers, but this is in Texas.
Now that CAN'T be enforcable. Once you leave a companies employ, they have no rights to what you do.
Additionally, considering your next employer will probably have rights to everything you create then, your previous employers contract would be in direct conflict.
So if you slander or defame Radio Shack after leaving... they're to blame? ;-)
-WolfWithoutAClause
"Gravity is only a theory, not a fact!"Now it could also hurt the company too. The when I became afflicted with tendinitis, the WC insurance company tried to avoid responsiblity by claiming it is from my computing at home. Since the company had the same type of inventions agreement, I argued that since they owned all I worked on, then they had liability for all injuries from what I worked on. MSI took possesion of what I worked on at home, then claimed, in the WC hearing, claimed that program they took was not related to my employment which means they took my work by fraud.
The knife cuts both ways.
Fight Spammers!
Not necessarily. It depends on the wording of the contract. An "idea" isn't copyrightable/patentable until you actually DO it.
California Labor Code, section 2870 states that no matter what you signed, your employer cannot claim ownership of intellectual property which:
The article seems to brush across a major point of this dispute. Previously, if you had written down an idea on a napkin, flushed it out on toilet paper, or jotted notes in a notebook, the company had the copyright on, and trade secret protection for, the notebook.
The error of the court, and IANAL, is that there is no law defining ownership of ideas, only protection of expressions from copying and the protection of potentially useful or damaging secrets. In defiance of 200 years of patent law, the court claimed the ideas were property of Alcatel, and QED must be turned over.
We have the RIAA to thank for that incorrect interpretation of the wording of the contract. Now he is stealing the company's "Intellectual Property," as if he walked out of his office with a stapler, rather than the arguably correct interpretation.
What he did do, and the option which the courts have overlooked, is violate his contract. If he wrote down his idea, the company would have the copyright on the paper and, quite correctly, the court would award ownership of the medium to the company. But he didn't. He's required by the terms of his contract to disclose something to the company, and he hasn't. He is in breach of contract, not breach of property law.
Maybe it is just the Law.com article which is misframing the judgement as a property issue in order to goad slashdot. We would need to see the judgement directly to know whether the judges decided he should hand over the information in order to fulfill his contractual obligations, or because the ideas in his head weren't his property. Is any lawyer (or law student) present that knows what the difference in punishments would be if this were a property issue as opposed to fulfilling contractual obligations?
-Chris
This Sig is a mnemonic device designed to allow you to recognize this author in the future.
He should stipulate in his will that when he dies, the part of his brain that contains the idea be cut out and sent to that company with a letter stating "pursuant to court ruling blah blah blah, here is the idea I thought of."
Read this paragraph again:
"In April 1996, Brown sought a release from DSC to pursue his idea. Brown alleges that he asked several managers at DSC whether the company would be interested in helping him develop the idea. According to Brown, DSC and Brown began negotiating an agreement whereby DSC would pay Brown a percentage of savings realized by the company if the idea was successful and a percentage of income from third-party sales, but the company later halted negotiations. Brown says when he refused to reveal his idea, DSC fired him and sued him."
It seems to me, that while still employed he tried to negotiate an agreement with them, for them to pay him for this idea he had (Which he had not stated in his inventions). They started negotiating, and then a lawyer of theirs realized that "Wait, we own this, don't we?" So they asked him to turn it over. I'd say if he was negotiating to sell it, it was damn well concieved already. Only when he then refused to disclose, they fired him (under breach of contract) and sued his sorry butt.
This is not a precedent to them owning ideas in your head. It's a precedent saying, don't try to sell inventions to your employer, who was employing you when you came up with it. (Which really is rather fair).
It also depends on local laws. Some states provide rights to employees that cannot be signed away, no matter what the wording is.
You can never go home again... but I guess you can shop there.
The courts rightly recognized that employees should not be able to withhold potentially valuable ideas from their employer, specifically against their employee agreement.
Against the agreement, yes. But no employer should be able to require that employees do anything when they are not on company time. Otherwise how is the relationship any different from "master and slave"? Slavery was (at least in the U.S.) outlawed a long time ago . . .
He had an idea valuable to his employer, tried to get extra money from it, and when he didn't get an offer good enough, he refused to disclose the idea.
And just where is the problem in this? Assuming, of course, that Brown really did invent it on his own time, he should have every right to sell it to the highest bidder, or not sell it at all if he wants. The company certainly shouldn't have the right to take something from him that they never paid him to create in the first place.
I had been working for a company lately which was developing application for BCE Emergis.
One day, couple of months after I began there, the boss came to us and asked that we sign an NDA.
Was asked by BCE they said. And if we would not sign it, they would loose the contract.
So we read it, and it was pretty anoying, because it had been writen for BCE's employee, not their contracters.
So we would had clause stating that during the time of our employement, and 6 month after, we could not use the knowledge acquired during the time of the employement and that any developed application was belong to them.
But because we were not BCE's employee but the firm employee, it meant that we could not use this knowledge at all for the time I was there, even if the contract with BCE ended. Real bad for the firm also...
Well, we asked that the company call a lawyer for us with whom we discused and made some change to the NDA.
Nothing bad happened, and the lawyer almost laugh at us for being so "paranoid", but reading stories like this one, I think that it was not paranoia that much after all...
I'd rather be sailing...
"So, just out of curiousity, what does Alcatel actually *make*, so I can advise people to start avoiding them?"
Shitty USB ADSL "modems", and everyone already is.
graspee
Good one!!
XML causes global warming.
What would happen if it turned out that he'd actually stolen the idea from someone else? Think for a moment about what that does to Alcatel's claim.
Slashdot - News for Herds. Stuff that Splatters.
XML causes global warming.
If you live in a state that does not recognize your rights, you're left with what's in the contract. Of course, many people aren't confident enough to individually bargain such details of their contract, and many companies have a strict policy of one policy for all employees. What to do in that case? Well, your options are to find another employer or to collectively bargain a contract, or to collectively try to get a law passed to recognize your rights.
How does one collectively bargain a contract or collectively work to get a law passed? Well, you get together with coworkers and other in the same industry and either pressure employers to get them to the bargaining table or you lobby politicians to get a bill. Call me a cynic, but given that your employer and top management has more money than all the employees put together, I wouldn't count on getting a law passed by traditional $lobbying$. Either way, though, what we're talking about is a union. I'd recommend checking out WashTech or the IWW.
I contract for a defense branch. My employer is pretty wormy though. They tried to get me to sign a non disclosure/non compete agreement that was quite draconian. Running it by 4 attorneys they all told me that I would have a bright future as a stock clerk if I signed it. So I didn't. The agreements would have given them rights to practically everything in my head.
I then proceeded to create an application that the defense folks wanted.
So I copyrighted in my name. I give it to the military, my employer gets zip.
are they going to get the idea now that they've won it? Pry it out of his head with a crowbar? The article says the idea is only in his head, does the court expect him to spend his time finishing developing it? If I was him I'd appeal and if I lost again, I'd delete any portion of the code (or at least encrypt it and say I deleted it) and refuse to write the code. Basically say "Well, if it's YOUR idea then YOU code it", then I'd probably move because you can be damned sure I wouldn't be paying those legal fees.
If a company owns the ideas in our head, shouldn't they own the bad ones too? What about postal workers who had the idea to kill their co-workers? Is this idea property of the USPS?
http://www.gamedev.net/reference/articles/article
Alcatel management are perpetrating thought crimes against their employees. Their actions demonstrate the undeniable fact that they are evil, no better than the Church when it burned people at the stake 500 years ago in the process of executing other thought crimes. I urge in the strongest fashion that anyone reading this who works at Alcatel immediately quit, or you will burn slowly, like Evan, at the hands of an inquisition no less terrifying than that of history.
This post expresses my opinion, not that of my employer. And yes, IAAL.
I would like to thank you for pointing this out. Like everybody else on here I was getting ready to make a mess in my pants - but after reading your statement it suddenly dawned on me:
If this idea really had nothing to do with the company's business and couldn't be applied to anything they were doing - why in the heck did this guy try to sell his idea back to them?
I've had discussions along these lines before - but I have to admit my sympathy for the guy disappeared when I realized that he was trying to sell an idea back to a company that he admittedly finalized while working for them. While he may be innocent of any intentional "wrongdoing" he's still guilty of being an idiot.
Personally I still think this story is interesting based on the fact that the court ordered him to pay the companies legal fees. I believe this is practiced in Europe (at least as far as civil court is concerned) and I've long supported its use here. This says to me the court/judge seemed to feel that went beyond a mere misunderstanding into the "gross negligence" category of dispute.
And considering the circumstances in a fair and rational manner - I would have to say I agree with them.
J
I love idealists not because I am one, but because they make life bearable for pragmatists such as myself.
...And cellphones.
... I would claim that I just had some idea about a new kind of porn site, then I would contact the media to let them know that Alcatel was considering entering the porn business any day...
sign away your rights
You can not sign away your rights per-se. That is, you can not sign yourself into slavery. You can not sign away your right to be secure in your person. You can agree to put reasonable restrictions on these rights (i.e. Non-disclosure resricts your right to free speach).
In this case, the company is saying he signed away his right to be secure in his person (your thoughts are your own). Had he created an actual object, blue print, algorithm etc etc etc that would be one thing, but he developed a thought in his head.
Furthermore, it was an idea that he did not use company resources to develop. As I understand it (IANAL) one of the main things that these agreements protect is company investment. If he used company resources to develop this idea, that's one thing, the company invested, they have an interest. But the fact that this idea was developed during his free time does not give the company an interest in the idea.
Sure you could say that he was being paid by the company during this time, but if all he was doing for months was sitting and formulating ideas in his head and not showing any results to the company, that's their problem.
The fact that he was negotiating a contract with his employer for this new idea (developed off the clock or off the record any ways) has no berring on the company's rights. Furthermore the fact that when he did no sign the new contract they fired him, means that at the time they did not feel it fell under the current contract.
The whole feel I get from this is that the company got pissed, fired him and then tried to take his idea to reap the bennifits without paying him.
Personaly speaking, if you fire an employee, any (non developed) ideas that they had are free to the open market. If the company was too stupid to see the value of the idea, tough shit for them.
T Money
World Domination with a plastic spoon since 1984
First off I've never worked for IBM but at the time this discussion was going on I lived in Poughkeepsie and knew a lot of IBMers, so YMMV.
In any case around the time OS/2 was coming out a lot of the guys started writing OS/2 software in their free time who worked in other divisions of the company. They wanted to release it as freeware (for example a powerful text editor with REXX built in scripting sort of like an IBMified EMACS for OS/2, or a toolkit for designing the 3D icons that OS/2 supported). IBM employees were of the opinion that they were under a "we own you brain" contract so any software they wrote, even on their own time, even unrelated to their job was the property of IBM and thus it had to be distributed as freeware only after IBM had approved its distribution as freeware. As a result there was an internal and an external BBS for these freeware OS/2 applications.
IBM never went to court with any of these guys, they were all of the "a deals a deal" opinion, and that the contract did mean that IBM owned any creative work of their's. But there was discussion the OS/2 community when some of these programs leaked as to whether this was piracy or not. These programs had never been copyrighted, their authors had intended to release them as freeware, the copyright holder had not asserted rights among the general community (the employees were waiting for a "go ahead" from IBM, IBM hadn't given a go or a stop signal)....
Even if he did develop this idea during work hours, as long as he was also doing what the company asked him to do, they don't have exclusive rights to his idea untill it's in physical form.
T Money
World Domination with a plastic spoon since 1984
Assignment of Inventions and Original Works.
(a) Inventions and Original Works Retained by Me. I have attached hereto as Exhibit A a complete list of all inventions, original works of authorship, developments, improvements, and trade secrets that I have, alone or jointly with others, conceived, developed or reduced to practice before the commencement of my employment with the Company, that I consider to be my property or the property of third parties and that I wish to have excluded from the scope of this Agreement. If disclosure of an item on Exhibit A would cause me to violate any prior confidentiality agreement, I understand that I am not to list such in Exhibit A but am to inform the Company that all items have not been listed for that reason. A space is provided on Exhibit A for such purpose. If no list is attached, I represent that there are no such items.
(b) Inventions and Original Works Assigned to the Company. I agree that I will make prompt written disclosure to the Company of and will assign to the Company without further payment or consideration all my right, title and interest in and to any ideas, inventions, original works of authorship, developments, improvements or trade secrets which I may solely or jointly conceive or reduce to practice, or cause to be conceived or reduced to practice during the period of my employment with the Company. I understand that only ideas, inventions, original works of authorship, developments, improvements and trade secrets which
(i) were not developed or produced using equipment, supplies, facilities or trade secrets that belong to the Company, and
(ii) do not relate to (A) the business of the Company as it is currently conducted or contemplated to be conducted or as it may be conducted during the term of my employment by the Company or (B) actual or contemplated research or development conducted by the Company, and
(iii) were not developed or produced during ordinary business hours
are not covered by my obligations to report and assign under the first sentence of this paragraph (b).
Some observations:
1. If he had the idea before he was hired, he should have listed it. If he did not list it then, he cannot credibly assert that he had it then. "If no list is attached, I represent that there are no such items."
2. The fact that he did not write down the idea, does not work in his favor. The agreement obligates him to disclose ideas in writing to the Company during his employment. ". . . I will make prompt written disclosure to the Company of . . . any ideas. . . which I may . . . conceive . . . during the period of my employment with the Company." This is what he was hired to do.
3. If you want to make sure that it is yours cybermace5 had it right your own time, your own stuff and journals, journals, journals.
4. RTFC. If you do not understand it find someone to explain it to you. If the Company is hiring you for a technical position it is because they want your thoughts and are willing to pay for them. They are entitled to what you do on their time or with their stuff. If that makes you unhappy, you need to find a different way to make a living. Can you say consultant?
It's a helpful thing to remember when the company pays for lots of additional days off, doesn't question sick days, and give you equipment to take home to work.
I routinely develop ideas (training materials for example) at home, in my spare time.
Does my company have a right to them? Hell yes, they pay me to perform my job, not on an hourly rate, but on a yearly salary.
Do I like it? Hell No, but I like the pay, so I find it an even trade. Now, material not job specific, that's outta bounds...
Yo Grark
The Sum of all idiots is one genius shy.
Canadian Bred with American Buttering
IEEE has an Intellectual Property Committee that researches and investigates IP laws and agreements and such. They often propose policy to the government (US, specifically).
One of the things they're working on right now is collecting information and opinions on pre-assignment agreements (these are the agreements that you're asked to sign at the start of employment, or a contract, which assign all rights to the company you're working for. I highly suggest that everyone who has a strong view go to http://ieeeusa.org/committees/IPC/ and read the information they have and make comments using the form on that page.
-Todd
"The details of my life are quite inconsequential..."
At first I thought this was a case of Brown mentioning an idea and the company taking the idea and running with it. I seriously don't have too big a problem with that. Everybody has idle musings and ideas, but it's the people who act on them who are rewarded.
But this? It's reminicent of the Borg, pardon the Trek reference all your base truely are belong to us... The fact that this project predates his employment should render such a lawsuit and intellectual claims null and void. Somebody in the courthouse has obviously fallen asleep at the wheel... But it just goes to show you... THE JOB IS NOT YOUR FRIEND. Depsite popular belief, they are not there for your benefit, no matter how much like it. in otherwords, what you do outside of work is your business, not theirs because they really don't want you to succeed past the point where you are no longer dependant on them.
You need a FREE iPod Nano
The Mongrel Dogs Who Teach
What about non-compete clauses? Those hold up in court. Of course they can control what you do
The Mongrel Dogs Who Teach
God, this is going to sound callous and arrogant but... WALK AWAY If you don't like the thought of this, then don't take the job. Don't sign the contract. (OK, you should probably try to negotiate the clause away, first, but failing that....)
Convictions cost , my friend. Freedom isn't free. You have to decide how much is the right to your own work worth to you
The Mongrel Dogs Who Teach
I just won't allow companies to suck the life out of me. I give them 1/3 (too frequently 1/2) of my professional time. I'll be damned if they take my personal projects and make me foot the bill.
He told them, on work time, at work. I always figured that if I said something at work "hey what if we put this gizmo with that whatsit" then they would own it. But if I thought of putting the gizmo with the whatsit on my own time, and then sold it on my own, either to somebody else, or actually brought a patented product into work to sell them (and I still think even that would be iffy) that would be different. Hell, if it's just his thoughts, how can he prove that he didn't just think it up at work? He should have kept his mouth shut.
Free Mac Mini
. . . would there have been the tech explosion in Silicon Valley?
/mine/, not my employer's. It's up to me to decide whether I want to sell them (which is what I'm doing when I accept a salary for working on ideas); anything else amounts to indentured servitude.
After all, think of the number of startups that formed when someone had a cool idea, left their employer, and started out on their own . . . Companies like Intel, for example.
Personally, I find this kind of thing utterly insane, and really quite disgusting - my thoughts are
himi
My very own DeCSS mirror.
What does the labour code north of the 49th parallel say?
Something about giving away 40%+ of your already discounted gross wages to CCRA, but having enough beautiful women and tasty beer around to not care.
This sets a nice stage to provide a court test on the patentability of software at an appellate court level. If software is not patentable, then the agreement is not applicable to software.
He deserved to lose because he asked permission the way he did, and because he dissolved the relationship with his lawyer.
But that leaves several avenues for appeal, and one of them is to question the patentability of software in the first place.
-- Terry
.....that makes security products?
See: Who owns what's in your head? for a thorough overview of the topic. The short answer is that, yes, what Alcatel is claiming is really not that far out. The precedent has been established years ago.
A few years ago, the dot-com I was working for sold its B2C component to another dot-com. Both of them were involved in selling insurance online. The first has transformed itself into an ASP, the second is gone -- it literally no longer exists.
In the first few days after the transfer, we were presented with a contract to sign that would assign all rights to anything we created to our employer. My boss mentioned that they'd want to talk to me about my font site, and I f--king lost it. (He was a cool guy and could deal with me venting.) Given that many of us on the web dev team were pursuing our own things on the side, I decided to put a stick in the hornets' nest and stir.
A good number of us, when informed that they were serious about their "ownership" of our ideas/creations, decided to present a united front and get them to change the wording so that it clearly specified that they could only claim ownership on ideas as the pertain to the business of selling health insurance online.
Surprisingly enough, they did it with no complaint. What I've discovered since then is that companies are willing to flex on this. Really...what is an insurance dot-com going to do with my fonts? Or with the novel I just wrote? They don't...the blanket statement is just there so that they can capitalize on people stupid enough to sign away their rights...they'll adapt it so that it merely protects their business.
blog |
But what idea's was he employed to invent?
If I'm employed by wal-mart to develop advertising ideas, and I develop an idea for a new laundry detergent (I'm reaching I know) does that give Wal-Mart exclusive rights to my idea?
Like wise, if I'm employed by Intel to design CPUs and I come up with an idea for a new RAM chip, does that idea become Intel's?
T Money
World Domination with a plastic spoon since 1984
I work at Alcatel in Plano, and most people here agree that while Evan is a nice guy, he pretty much slit his own throat from day one.
:-)
This is really not as simple as "Alcatel (DSC, really) owning soandso's idea", although it makes great headlines.
What happened was:
1. He signed an agreement (which most of us do not have to, BTW) giving DSC rights to anything he invented - gee whiz, Cisco, Sun, Nortel, Oracle - pretty much eveyone does this with the few choosen employees who get to sit around and dream up these things.
2. He made the big mistake of telling his supervisors about this great idea of his when there was no written documentation (duh.)
3. DSC offered to give him a big $$$ check for his idea, but, he decided to "fight the man" (read: gamble) for his idea and he lost.
4. Even Evan himself admits that he could have excluded this idea (that he has always said he starting working on in 1975) from the legal agreement (doh!). Maybe he would have stood a better chance in court if he had some prior documentation or at least a mention of it.
Whats the real lesson here? Common sense always applies. If you've got a million dollar idea - dont sign an intellectual prop agreement! Or how about, Dont listen to lawyers who want you to go to court so they can get rich from you (my personal favorite).
I truly like Evan Brown, and i hate to see him get slammed by our legal guys (i've watched this case since 1999), but for the most part we all believe he just made bad decisions as opposed to being victimized.
BTW, we have running joke at Alcatel that our legal department is a profit center - we've sued many more people and corps...
Moderators need an additional choice: "Karma Whore" for people who cut-and-paste articles as their comments!
You can't have it both ways.
obvisouly we aren't privvy to all the details surrounding the case; but I can only assume he discussed reasonably high-level concepts with his colleagues.
so, lets say, i go to my bosses and say i'm resigning because i've come up with a really good idea to make money from software (in this fairy tale, assume my idea is unrelated to our core business). i tell them the high-level angel on it, but retain the details. now that a precident has been set, they say "hahaha, sorry pal; all your ideas are belong to us". and they sue me. um, ok, so i just go, "oh right well my idea is based on the precognescent polarity of perpetual motion and you just go click click click and it all happens."
my point is, if the details haven't been revealed to anyone else, do they have the right to supena my brain? and how will they ever know that my disclosures were exactly the way it should be?
What this says is that if Einstein had this idea floating around in his head for decades, and then got a job with a company (in this modern world), and mentioned his pet theory to someone at work and they were interested, he could get HIS idea sued out of him and patented by the company, and they can proceed to patent and use his idea (and make him pay for it!) while they leave their competition in the dust, and leave the rest of their field in The Dark Ages.
Don't we have any laws to protect THE RESEARCHER who actually comes up with his own ideas anymore? You know, like it says in that Constitution document that everyone ignores? And for that matter, what about enriching the scientific community instead of the corporations? Did we all just forget about that in our mad dash to acquire the Holy and All-Powerful Dollar?
Anyone who could perform or support an act like this has no sense of ethics in the first place, which includes at least one major corporation, a bunch of lawyers, and a judge; I'm not surprised at all. So call the thought police on me already, I'm guilty.
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
I interviewed with a technology development company and was asked to sign one of these forms right there at the interview. It was made clear to me that if I didn't sign it right then and there, the interview could not continue. Most of it involved non-disclosure. But some of it did sign over all my invention rights to them.
There was one clause that specified that if I was not hired, then the contract only applied to information made available to me during the interview. It was not entirely clear how well that applied to the parts about me handing over all my rights to my own intellectual property.
The really stupid part of this wasn't that they wanted me to sign such a contract, but that they barely gave me enough time to read the whole thing (I actually did). Due to it being in the circumstance of an interview, it wasn't possible to go consult an attorney, much less find one that practiced in both employment law and intellectual property law (we're probably talking a week or two at least). When I asked the HR guy about it, he indicated they had interviewed 3 other candidates for the position and were looking to make the hiring decision within the week, and that such a delay would probably mean the position would no longer be open.
What made me decide to walk out wasn't so much the fact that the situation existed (though I might well have because of it), but rather, the fact that the HR guy was so perfectly prepared in his answer to me. Whether he was telling me the truth or not wasn't even relevant. Later, I found the same job was posted again. Who knows how many walkouts they had.
Later, a recruiter was trying to get me in to interview for a position at an entirely different company. On Monday he was saying they had people from their New York headquarters in for the week to do the interviewing and they were booked up very tight. By Wednesday, he had an appointment for me for a Friday interview. Then the surprise. He wanted to send me the non-disclosure and non-compete contract. His explanation was because the schedule was so tight, they wanted people to be coming in with the contract already signed. At first we had an issue with the fact that he was sending it to me in Microsoft Word format (whee, I get to see all the revisions they ever made to it). I pointed out to him that I was a Unix person, this was a Unix job, and he was a recruiter doing more than half his work with Unix positions, and he wanted me to run Microsoft crap? So I ended up having him pull up a copy and asked him about some clauses in it (he was patient enough to do this, surprisingly). I focused on the non-compete and asked him if there were any clauses that made it only apply if I got the job. There were none. So I explained to the recruiter that "If I interview there having signed this, find out what this secret area of business is that they are doing, them I'm no longer allowed to work for anyone else in the same line of business, or even related, even if I don't get this job?" He paused for a minute and then said "I guess not". now I wished I had gone ahead and let him send me a copy of that.
The immoral of the stories here are that companies will try to take advantage of you one way or another. And it's probably even worse during this current economic downturn (equivalent to a full blown depression if you look just at the high-tech businesses by themselves). Watch out for what you sign.
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
What depresses me most about this is the unbelievable smugness of attorney Eric Pinker of Somebody, Somebody and Pinker, with lines like, "This isn't complicated at all." Of course it isn't, Eric. Somebody hires you and your friends to beat the shit out of some poor sucker and you do it. Simple. Nobody has any rights whatsoeover except you, your colleagues, and the assholes who have enough money to hire you. The ideals you may have had when you were younger don't mean shit. Ethics don't mean shit, and most of all, other people don't mean shit. Only you and money mean a damn thing, and I sure feel privileged to be an insignificant part of your world.
Probably the best defense against this is to be employed in California. Lots of tech companies here have invention clauses in their employment agreements, and most of them don't have any exclusions, but all of them come with a copy of California's law on the subject. That law limits the scope of any such invention clause to two things:
- Things invented, regardless of subject matter, during your period of employment while actually at work.
- Things invented, whether actually at work or not, which fall into the category of things your employer is currently doing or is planning on doing in the future.
The law's clear on a bunch of points. Salaried employees ARE NOT always at work. Companies don't get to redefine "what they do" in twisted ways to cover anything under the sun. The contract may not legally contain terms which contradict the law. The contract may not be applied to things invented before you were employed there (provided you list them so the employer knows what they are) nor after your employment ended (although if the idea is in the same area as your work and within a reasonable time after the end of your employment the employer can argue that you actually came up with it before you left and didn't say anything and the burden will be on your to refute that).The conditions aren't perfect, but they're reasonable enough that most people can live with them. .ca.us may be crazy, but sometimes they're crazy in good ways.
"There are stronger cases to use to fight software patents."
Which will never get their day in an appellate level court, where they have the danger of becoming case law against software patents.
Any time this issue ever gets raised, it ends up getting settled out of court to prevent it becoming a legal precedent.
-- Terry
... so, you're using their services, paying them for an education. and during that time ... inventions of yours become theirs? yes, i'd like to walk into my local fast-food chain, order a meal, and be told that if i come up with any ideas and scribble them down on -their- napkins while sitting at -their- tables (and especially if the energy to do so comes from -their- food) then my ideas are theirs ... wonderful.
... of course, we're still not sure how to split up the ownership between team members =)
btw, at my university, we discussed at length the status of our code written during senior projects -- most of the projects were for university-related functions, such as support for prof's, the dorms, some of the departments (especially websites) etc. and we were told that, as far as the prof's knew, there was absolutely nothing transferring ownership of such code to the university
Just FYI: in some states, not only are these agreements not legally binding, it's actually _illegal_ for an employer to attempt to make you sign one.
C//
My previous employer... hey that crook Dennis Kozlowski from Tycho was on the board... made us all sign non-compete clauses. You cannot WORK for a similar company for six months. I signed it because I was told it was unenforceable in California, where I was located.
I would have made a big show of laughing in their faces over it, only I would have made sure to get everything on tape.
*evil smile*
C//
. . . would there have been the tech explosion in Silicon Valley?
When i was out at a dot-com one of the guys there said that one of the big reasons that Cali had so much tech stuff so quick is the lack of non-compete agreements. I forgot if they were illegal, or just de-facto unenforcible, but it allowed a person to have a startup in very quick time. If you had a better idea, you could find skilled people in your industry very easily, and you can get started without a great deal of training. Dunno if this is true, but an interesting explanation.
If folks are encumbered by "ideas" that others own, this freedom of movement is obviously curtailed. I wonder if the state of Cali is looking into this, and their position on this. I doubt much, right now the "chilling effect" of owned intellectual property is fairly low on the economic influences in Cali.
Why do people keep thinking that the truth will set them free? The fact is, a smart person -- even if they are entirely in the right, ethically, morally, and probably legally -- will likely get fscked over by the legal system if they represent themself.
Yeah, it would be great if life were like movies, where you could simply plead your case, making sense, convincing a judge/jury that you are right. Unfortunately, lawyers are highly paid for a reason. THEY KNOW HOW TO PLAY THE GAME. Lawyers go through specialized training, they pass tests, they have other lawyers to confer with, they understand the rules of the game.
My god, even lawyers usually know enough to not try to defend themselves (something about having a fool for a client).
So, typically what we see is a guy defending himself and then getting outraged that he got screwed by the judge because he missed a deadline, or didn't file a brief correctly.
This guy may lose the money he'd make from the invention, $300,000 for the company's legal fees, his house, etc... Yet in his "What's new" page on his web site he states Again, the courts violated my rights to due process. Come on, you almost never hear people who've been defended by good lawyers claim that their due process rights have been repeatedly violated.
Maybe he should have contacted the EFF. No matter what, he should have gotten a snake^H^H^H^H^H lawyer to defend him.
Oh, and I hate people who write their web sites in the third person...
This is one of the worst problems in our legal system. The system allows ownership of ideas. Guess what? Everything is an idea. Every physical object exists not only as the object but the idea of the object.
Let's say I come up with a beautiful new object. It is called foobar. I package foobar in a black box that allows only one person to look at it at a time and I put a liscense agreement on the box that states that anyone who opens the box agrees to the liscense and may not remove the object from the box and may not discuss the object with other people, may not sell foobar or its container. In fact, foobar still belongs to me but you may look at it until I say that your time is up. You also agree that you may not make likenesses of or references to foobar. Your liscense to look at foobar is non-transerable. You may not destroy foobar.
What if foobar wasn't just something nice to look at. What if it was a new powerful language that I discovered that could make human communication 10 times faster, more precise, less ambiguous, and was easier to learn than any other previous language. What if foobar was a method for generating an anti-gravity field requiring very little power or what if foobar was machine that cost less than $10 to construct and could produce enough food and clean water for a person to live on for a year with the addition of a 9V battery and some dirt?
What if everything was foobar'd? So that every time someone or the company that they worked for cme up with an idea or a product it was placed in one of these black, liscense-laden boxes? How long would it take before the open exchange of ideas, the systems of commerece and research into all things new and innovative would be frozen by a morass of black tape?
Imagine a clerk coming up with a way to shave 10% of off a companys expenses yearly. Shouldnt that guy have compensatione for that? Its not like he gets any money for it on his montly paycheck.
This kind of behavior is just self damaging to the company. They should encourage their employees to think more and give them bonuses when ther ideas are working.
The message they are sending out is shut your mouth, dont think about thinking!
HTTP/1.1 400
yeah, i think it probably says something very similar to that. I was offered a job by a company with HQ in Texas, and as part of the package along with health and medical and drug test (don't even get me started on THAT) info, is the standard IP and confidentiality agreemnet. It reads, in part:
Obviously I can't sign that. But that doesn't change the fact that several people have asked me to do so, with a straight face even. I live in CA, so "the maximum extent permitted by law" is apparently less than what passes for employment in Texas. One more reason we should bulldoze the state and give it back to the Mexicans.
So what did I do? I said, "This isn't enforcable in CA." They said, "You're right." I said, "So, how about we just strike it out?" They said, "Uhhh..." but they watched me do it, and I signed and dated the change, and they signed and dated it too, and that was that.
Humpty Dumpty was pushed.
DMCA makes it a crime to make available darn near anything that could be used to theoretically used to avoid copy protection.
Sec. 1201. Circumvention of copyright protection systems ..
(2) No person shall manufacture, import, offer to the public, provide, or otherwise traffic in any technology, product, service, device, component, or part thereof
It is so vaguely worded that litigators are citing the DMCA against anything and everything and stretching it to absurd lengths. (Think of the Felton SMDI paper.)
While you and I don't think of a reverse compiler as a hacking tool, try explaining that to layman.
for overtime or any of his expenses developing it. There was no contract nor request for this from a manager at work, so, this is not related to his job in any way. How would you like it if you were sued by a company you worked for 10 years ago for your increased productivity because of experience? Experience is part of the pay and is in no way are you obligated for your use of it. Basically, I don't see how a contract for employment, that was terminated by the employer, is enforcable by the employer in a court. Also, I think his line of reasoning that if it's not patentable, then it's not IP to begin with is very valid even in accordance to the contract. If companies want to ensure that employees don't skip town with their ideas, they should do one of the following: A) for inventors (R&D), they should ask frequently for their ideas that they are working on for their work and have them documented. If they don't come up with anything, then they aren't doing their job, and fire them. B) for developers, they should have slips for every project that the developers must sign before they can work on projects so they have documentation of what the company owns. Any ideas not covered by A or B are not part of what the company pays for, and are therefore not the companies. The burden of proof MUST lie on the company because the developer or the inventor has no way of proving that he didn't come up with the idea on company time, but the company could if in fact it was true and they took care to document what IP is theirs.
Karma Clown
just to sound corny and out of date...
All your thoughts are belong to US
If you don't like the terms of a contract then DON'T SIGN IT! I am sure Alcatel included such a clause in the contract that would allow for something like this to happen. THis is no one's falut but the man who is being "exploited."
... and DON'T WORK! The vast majority of employers of engineers and programmers compel prospective employees to sign such contracts.
Wansu, th' chinese sailor
America may have freedom of speech but it doesn't seem like it has freedom of thought.
One huge motherload of a law, in the US and EU, that states that whatever I do on my spare time, is my own business.
Maybe it is time for the companies to treat their employees better so that any ideas that they might have get appriciated properly and they get their just award. I wouldn't go through the trouble of setting up a company of my own if I could make very good money from staying where I am and help my company with good ideas.
This is what a goverment should do, protect the little people. The goverment works for the people. But this is unfortunatly long forgotten...
"Establishing that Brown had the idea years before coming to DSC would have contradicted the signed agreement and gone a long way toward establishing Brown's credibility."
I am not familiar with Texas laws (other than the one about being allowed to blast anyone off your porch with your shotgun), but this is the crux of the matter, is it not? If he invented this thing before he joined Alcatel, the invention is his. If he came up with it after signing the agreement, it belongs to the company. Now it seems to me that it is not at all clear (as in proven) when this invention was made. For a judge to give a firm ruling on this, one way or the other, without any proof on this crucial point, is rather slipshod justice.
My question is: on whom lies the burden to provide proof about when the invention was made? The burden of proof lies on the claimant usually, and that would be Alcatel.
If construction was anything like programming, an incorrectly fitted lock would bring down the entire building...
Companies will try to take advantage of you and it's up to you to make sure they don't.
However, I think lawyers who dream up shit like this should still be victims of their own contracts one day. That would be fun, watching a fat arse lawyer slowly lose everything he has because he thought of it first.
I am sadly following all of this, and I have to make one assertion:
Companies do not have rights. Only individals do.
This may seem a niggling point, but I think it is the critical one, unnoticed by almost everyone.
What we have is a fictional individual trying to steal everything not nailed down, including thoughts. This fictional individual has no rights, by Jeffersonian standards, and damned be the 19th century Supreme Court justices that granted corporations the status of individuals.
Fighting non-existent corporate individuals is intentionally impossible.
But this case lies in a gray area, he notes, because until the idea is reduced to practice, it's not an invention and you can't patent it.
This simply isn't the law, at least not here in the United States. Many inventions have been patented without being reduced to practice.
You ever tried to be on welfare? An able bodied man? It ain't gonna happen, son.
And if you ever did go on welfare, it is not, not not going to pay your mortgage payment, nor would even begin to touch your rent, if you live anywhere halfway decent.
It's a few hundred dollars a month.
Your taxes wouldn't quintuple, BTW. Welfare doesn't even begin to nick the federal budget. For instance, Aid for Families with Dependent Children, even at its spending height, didn't exceed one percent (1.0%) of the national budget. People seem to think half their taxes are paid out to welfare receipients.
Now, if you want to talk the BIGGEST welfare scam of all time, think of this: 17% percent of your taxes, that is to say 17 times what we spend on little kids in poverty, is spent paying the interest on the national debt. That's the INTEREST. So when you hear them increasing the debt limit once more (it's 6.5 trillion now), you can listen to 17/100 of every one of your tax dollars pouring into wealthy holders of that debt paper. And it's been pouring into their pockets for over twenty years.
Let's see, let's just posit we take in 2 trill a year. 340 billion goes towards the bondholders who hold that paper. Hoody hoo!!!! multiply that by 20 years, assuming inflation makes all things equal, and we get:
6,800 billion dollars.
I somehow doubt we have paid poor people in the U.S. 6,800 billion dollars since 1980. On the other hand, we have paid individuals, funds, and business 6.8 trillion dollars of free money. And we haven't even touched the principal.
Take a look at the Federal Budget, or more tellingly, a graph of what we spend taxes on.
That teeny-tiny piece caled human services is what covers welfare. The big cancer is the debt, the service on the debt, and defense spending.
I *wish* we had a safety net in this country, but we don't. Welfare won't pay for anything. You have to have *no* income, sell your belongings, your home, kill your assets. I have bad memories of a brush with welfare when I was a kid. Believe me, you wait months to see any cash. And the money you get doesn't cover anything real. Better to beg in the streets. You might make more.
Okay, human services is not teeny... but welfare is a small portion of that.
Notice that Human Services spending is just slightly more than the debt service?
Too tired to read the budget to give better breakdown... night all.
It is exactly that simple. The reason employers can take such gratuitous advantage of their employees in certain places, notably several US states, is precisely that people are dumb enough to accept conditions like this. If all the good people in the industry turned around one day and told their potential employers to take a running jump, the employers with reasonable and fair conditions would get all the good people, and the scum would get the fate they deserve shortly afterwards. Trade unions have relied upon this principle for a very long time; it's a shame that there isn't really a major trade union for IT workers (yet).
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
The moral of this story is: Don't work for big companies. They will try to enforce this kind of thing. Work for small startups who won't even be around in a year, much less worry about intellectual property. They are more worried about staying afloat to care about nonsnese like this.
My beliefs do not require that you agree with them.
These contracts dont matter. All the company has to do is claim that your previous work is a 'trade secret' and constrain you on that.
I'm sorry, but you seem to be dispensing legal advice with WAY to much confidence. Not to mention the advice you're dispensing (It's no big deal if you sign it or not, the courts are reasonable) go against the rediculous reality in many other states, as demonstated by this and many other stories.
You better be careful with your complicent, "it's probably not that bad" thinking and do a little more investigating before you tell everybody to dismiss the warnings.
Secondly, while your state may have fair employment IP laws now, don't expect the trend to continue, especially when your state starts trying to lure high tech companies to your neck of the woods and when people are to ignorant to care and too complicent to even voice dissent.
"Communism is like having one [local] phone company " - Lenny Bruce
There's his first mistake. For anything more than suing a spammer YOU NEVER GO PRO SE! When will people get it through their thick melons that they don't know the law well enough to argue against a high-priced lawyer?! ARGH! Even if they have watched enough Law & Order to talk the talk, the judge still won't give them credit and will bias in favor of the one that passed the bar. We shouldn't be sympathizing with this guy. We should be blaming him for his inaction that caused a precedent to be set that can be used to affect all of us. This guy would have most likely won if he had just highered a decent lawyer.
In the first case, the one where you were told to sign the contract during the interview, you could have signed it, and made a case in court that your signature was obtained under duress -- namely, that the company-in-question used unfair leverage (your *desperate* need for a job) to get you to sign a highly unfair contract. Contracts signed under duress aren't binding.
In the second case, I would have fired up OpenOffice (which handles Word DOC files just fine), struck out the portions I didn't like, then signed it and turned it in. I'd say there's a ninety-percent chance that they won't read it, and that it'll just be thrown in your employee file; if the time ever comes to take you into court, well, they don't have a leg to stand on.
--
I Hit the Karma Cap, and All I Got Was This Lousy
It matters not now; he's got $330,000 in legal bills to pay back to Alcatel. On top of that, he has no job, no home and no one will probably hire him. Sounds to me like hireing a lawyer would have been much cheaper...
Don't be so sure. They probably have a blanket agreement that you are bound by whatever regulations they have, even if you haven't signed them explicitly. Even if it's not in any contract or regulation, a company can often make a reasonable claim that they own your job-related inventions (which is what we are talking about). After all, they (presumably) don't pay you for manual labor, so they must own at least some of your mental output.
It beats the crap out of severence.
Lets say I can claim that I planned, designed, discussed, and coded a project of 1,000 hours over a 1 year period. The company claims it, and I am hourly making $20 per hour. This means that they owe me $30,000 in back wages. I submit a bill, if they don't pay, I take them to our Department of Labor.
The point is that it does not prevent them from taking it, but it should make them think long and hard before doing so. Especially if it is obvious I did place a lot of work into something and I am not telling them how much...
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP
I did RTFA, maybe next time you should try RTFC before you reply. If you had, you might notice this:
..... But the fact that this idea was developed during his free time does not give the company an interest in the idea.
Furthermore, it was an idea that he did not use company resources to develop.
or this
The fact that he was negotiating a contract with his employer for this new idea (developed off the clock or off the record any ways)
Which both clearly indicate that he was doing this on his own time. Just because it's a long post doesn't mean you get to skim it. Read it through, then reply.
T Money
World Domination with a plastic spoon since 1984
This RCW, in fact, was what I quoted when giving my "list of inventions", indicating that I claimed ownership for any inventions or publications which I created in the past, present, or future, and had no intention of listing them, as they did not fall under the types of inventions or publications that were covered under the law.
This was four years ago. I wasn't in a desperate need for a job, and I hadn't even heard of OpenOffice then. But I would definitely have loved to do that, to make the tweak in the contract and let them have that. Hopefully they wouldn't pull a "You need to sign our official copy here. We just sent it to your recruiter so you could read it ahead of time." Of course my response would then be "How do I know that one is exactly the same as the one I read yesterday?"
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
That's a bad attitude. First, just about everyone has to sign one of these odius things. Second, a company that does not expect it's employess to think is doomed to fail. Third a company that's so rapicious about what it's employees comes up with, but does not expect them to think is likely to get what it expects: zero employee participation. Companies that act this way are going to thwart their best thinkers who will respond in kind.
DMCA, Hollings, Palladium. What might have sounded like paranoia is now common sense.
HP scoffed at the idea of a personal computer. Steve Wozniak got them to sign off on the idea.
Fight Spammers!