Who Owns Weblog Content?

dirvish writes "Information Week has a story discussing copyright issues and legal rights associated with employee blogs and RSS readers. Recently, some companies have come out with formal weblog policies and others have fired employees for inappropriate blogging. With an increase in official company blogs, and some large companies like Microsoft and Google offering popular blogging services, the issues become even more clouded. Some bloggers are beginning to speak out about corporate and government control, others would probably prefer to not risk their jobs."

Comments

Re:I own my own weblog content.

[xXunderdogXx]

Your argument is interesting in light of recent firings by employers because employees were smokers- even if they only smoked at home.

Employers have recently tried every carrot they can think of, including cash incentives and IPods, to persuade employees to quit smoking. Now they are trying the stick. Pointing to rising health costs, and to the oversize proportion of insurance claims attributed to smokers, employers around the United States are refusing to hire applicants who smoke, and sometimes they're firing employees who refuse to quit. Workers fired for smoking at home

The issue is slightly less applicable to blogging, of course, because there are no immediate health effects except for perhaps diminished social life.

Re:Common sense...

[QMO]

I don't think that my employer could stop me from blogging, but:
I did agree not to reveal confidential things, so I'd have to be careful about that.
I did agree that anything I create while employed here belongs to my employer, anything, work-related, or not, on my own time, or not, is theirs.

This last is the main barrier that I can see to my remaining with this company for the long term.

Re:If it is done on company time

[Rude Turnip]

"Then doesn't it belong to the employer?"

Here's another way to look at this issue. If I buy something online (ie a book, vacuum cleaner, whatever) at work, does it automatically become the property of the employer?

Re:Common sense...

[Macadamizer]

"sooner or later, they'll find a way to get rid of you without you getting wrongful termination."

I agree with this post, but I just thought I would point something out here. Every state, except Montana, is an at-will employment state. What that means is that unless you have an employment CONTRACT, and not just an offer letter and the like (pro athletes have contracts, most others don't), your employer can fire you at ANY time for ANY reason at all (with the exception of certain prohibited reasons, like firing you because of your race, national origin, that sort of thing). So, you could go to work today, and your employer could fire you for wearing a red shirt. Or fire you just because he couldn't get it up with the wife last night.

Wrongful termination means being fired for whistleblowing, or for using your FMLA or other leave rights, being fired after exercising some other protected right (like making an OSHA complaint), or being fired because of your membership in a protected class (race, gender, national origin, religon, age if over 40, there's a couple of others I can't remember off of the top of my head). ANY other firing, by definition, is not "wrongful termination."

So, they don't NEED the evidence to fire you. They may WANT the evidence because of some internal reasons, but there is no LEGAL reason to obtain the evidence. You can ALWAYS be fired for just about anything.

Of course, you can quit whenever you want to -- that's the flip side of at-will -- they can't make you keep working if you don't want to.

Just wanted to point that out...

YOYOW: You Own Your Own Words

[ewhac]

The policy on The Well, an online conferencing system that's been around since 1984, established a policy to address this issue long ago:

You own your own words.

That is, you retain complete ownership of -- and therefore responsibility and liability for -- whatever you write. This relieves The Well of any liability for the actions/writings of their posters, and the posters can rest assured that neither The Well nor any other user will turn around and sell their writings to someone else without permission. This policy, referred to by Well members with the acronym YOYOW, has been in place and has worked fairly well for the last 20 or so years.

YOYOW: Ask for it by name :-).

Schwab

Re:As long as computer use policies are spelled ou

[Anonymous Coward]

And when they are spelled out they can be overly broad. Leaving the company a lot of leeway to interperet them however they want and leaving the employee with few options.

You see the same thing with other policys that attempt to control not just work-time and work related activities (in which the company has a legitimate interest), but also in other areas where the interest is more questionable (see the current debate about banning employees from smoking at home).

I remember one non-compete that was put in front of me that would have (in it's broadest interperatation) restricted me from working in almost any IT related job. It was unlikely to hold up in court, but proving that would have cost me money (I didn't sign it).

Re:The company should own things that concern them

[Vellmont]

Thing was, we did it from keystroke logs on her comp at work (legally obtained)


Monitoring someones personal life through keystroke logging? That's probbably legal, but really falls into the arena of scumbag behaviour.

Re:I own my own weblog content.

[pclminion]

I know the parallel isn't perfect, but replace "smoker" with "pregnant woman" and see how far, legally, that goes.

I don't think the analogy is even close. Smoking is a vice. Pregnancy is not a vice -- it is a critical part of the perpetuation of the human species.

Just because both happen to involve health care costs doesn't mean that they are at all equivalent.

Re:Common sense...

[Anonymous Coward]

The main reason they want the evidence is because if they fired you for just-cause, they officially don't have to pay you unemployment. Now, typically proving "just-cause" in this case is very difficult, and in a lot of instances employers won't say much out of fear of being sued by the former-employee...

altered at-will status.

[slashkitty]

However, most people don't realize that your company policies may alter the at-will status. For example, does your company have an "introductory period," where, for the intro period, where after 3 months, your job is somehow safer. The courts have ruled that this creates an implied contract... so if you're suddenly terminated, check your companies policies! more here: http://www.ppspublishers.com/ez/html/030204.htm

Ban pregnancy?

[EvilStein]

God, that would be great. Nothing like having to pick up the slack for a female coworker that's off for months for maternity leave and then taking off early all the time to tend to children.

Re:Common sense...

[winkydink]

It's a pretty common clause. Better go check. That's why it's best to list a bunch of exclusions when you fill out that paperwork. Most time, unless they are in direct conflist with what your employer does, they buy off on them.

Re:Common sense...

[Tassach]

Yes, it's a been standard clause in the employement agreement for just about every development job I've taken. It's also one I make them amend before I agree to take the job.

These things ARE negotiable, and you're a fool if you don't negotiate. I've only had one potential employer refuse to remove a "everything you do outside the office belongs to us" clause, and that was a BIG RED FLAG which told me I did *not* want to work there.

Job interviews work both ways: they're checking you out to see if they want you to work for them, you need to be checking them out to make sure you wan to work for them. Even if you *ARE* so desperate that you'd take the job for minimum wage and on the condition that you'll service the boss orally 3 times a week, you never let *THEM* know that. Whenever you're offered a job, you always let them think that you have another offer on the table.

Re:Common sense...

[kaiidth]

In the UK, contracts are pretty much unavoidable: there's a handy page on it here.

The contract can be verbal, but within two months of starting work the employer is required to provide employees with a written statement of the main terms of the contract. This is good to know if you're working for a shadowy sort of organisation - you can legally walk in and hit them with the Employment Rights Act 1996, and if they refuse to cough up a contract after two months - or indeed sack you - you are legally in the right and can do them for it...

Anyone who works in the UK without a contract, be careful; at the minimum, you're probably working illegally in that your employers have probably not gone through the motions as far as national insurance goes, and are not planning to do so. In this case, you will not be eligible for normal unemployment pay afterwards :(

As far as I know, broadly similar terms apply in Germany and in France.

Re:Common sense...

[Cowardly Anonym]

I had never heard of the concept of "at-will" employment (I'm Canadian) before you mentioned it, and having looked it up, I'm amazed that the U.S. has such a thing:

History of At-Will Employment Law in the USA

From the above site:
"... the USA is alone among the industrialized nations of the world in providing no protection against wrongful termination of employment."