Slashdot Mirror
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."
We don't have it now, so I don't see the problem.
You do have a representative democracy in the US, but it takes more than one person dragging their fuzzy ass off the couch to show up at the polls to counter well-funded lobbyists.
You get the governement you vote for. You suffer the consequences for the one you don't bother voting against.
As for the moderators who modded my last post off-topic, you can jump in a hole and go fuck yourself. Go ahead and mod me into the cellar for this one too. If you think representative democracy and SCO's lawsuits are not connected, you are living on another planet.
"Rocky Rococo, at your cervix!"
No, an employer does not own your thoughts, but they do own any product of those thoughts (i.e., invention) if you've signed an agreement to that effect. It seems that the main piece of evidence that worked against Mr. Brown was a memo he wrote that stated " I have developed a method of converting machine executable binary code into high level source code form using logic and data abstractions. The purpose of this idea is to take existing executable programs and "reverse engineer" the intelligence from the programs and "re-code" the intelligence into a portable high level language." Also, it seems that Mr.Brown was working on projects like this while at DSC (Alcatel). So it would seem that Evan Brown is being disingenuous. I feel that if you don't want your inventions to become your employers', then don't sign these kind of agreements. The reason people do sign these type of agreements is that they want the security of a job, otherwise they would start their own businesses using their "great ideas". It's a tradeoff -- security or freedom?? You always give up rights in order to obtain more security. Of course the loss of those rights is very painful (see "The Patriot Act"). I think John Gardner once wrote " We don't deceive ourselves about the consequences of our actions, we deceive ourselves about the ease with which we can live with those consequences...".