Does Your Employer Own Your Thoughts?

MJ writes "Evan Brown has finally lost his 7 year court battle over ownership of thoughts in his brain. Judge Henderson of the 219th District Court in Collin County, Texas granted DSC Communications Corporation, Inc (now Alcatel, USA) a Final Judgement granting DSC ownership of Mr. Brown's idea of a reverse compiler that Mr. Brown claims to have begun formulating twelve years before his employment at DSC and during his off-time while at DSC. Mr. Brown has received media coverage in print, televion and on the Internet: The John Marshall Journal of Computer & Information Law, Wired, Computerworld. This rings similar to previous Slashdot articles on employer/employee IP rights."

Comments

Re:Say it isn't so

[matdavis]

This section I read from the judgment sounds to me as if his idea was exactly what he was supposed to be working on (thanks to Google's cache, and the bold is mine):

B. The Status of the Solution

Brown repeatedly claims there is a fact issue that the Solution was not an invention, or even a conception falling under the terms of the employment agreement. However, he claimed in his April 1996 memo to management, I have developed a method of converting machine executable binary code into high level source code form using logic and data abstractions. . . . Brown has not presented any other credible evidence to contradict this assertion.

Brown also claims Alcatel was not in the business of designing software, but was in the telecommunications business. Thus, the employment agreement is not applicable to the Solution. However, the evidence in the record establishes that Brown managed the group at Alcatel charged with maintaining and developing automated conversion tools for converting high-level code to low- level code. The record further shows that one of Brown's job functions was to manually convert Alcatel's existing low-level code to high-level code. The evidence shows Alcatel twice investigated automated conversion tools in 1993 and 1995. In addition, in 1993, Brown managed the employee charged with investigating the low-level to high-level automated code conversion process and received a status report on his research on October 18, 1993.

We do not believe the court below erred in concluding Alcatel, pursuant to the employment agreement, owns full legal right, title and interest to the process and/or method that is known as the Solution. We overrule Brown's first issue in its entirety.