Slashdot Mirror
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."
We've been on a fairly steady decline since they found out they can make employees go through demeaning tests for insurance purposes and are currently at the point where companies are trying to kick smokers out. Meanwhile there are people arguing free speech rights only apply when the government is attempting to restrict them, conveniently ignoring the fact that if there were any multinational corporations around when the founders set this place up maybe the Bill of Rights would have been a little tighter.
Try not. Do or do not, there is no try.
-- Dr. Spock, stardate 2822-3.
Then doesn't it belong to the employer?
Seriously, why do we need something like a blogger's "bill of rights?" If you do something on your employer's time that isn't related to your job, then you should consider yourself lucky that either your employer doesn't know or care. You could lose your job for blogging at work, unless maybe your blog is promoting the company's products and services and some manager thinks that is just good free advertisement.
The woman who proposed that blogger's bill of rights got fired because she posted on her blog pictures that could be offensive to some of her employer's customers and let people know where she worked. That's just about one of the things that you DONT DO online. You just don't post comments that can be connected with your employer unless your employer has given you the green light to do so.
Click here or a puppy gets stomped!
Or one of those people who leaves the job at the office and whose personal life has nothing to do with his or her current employment.
You know, THOSE crazy people.
In the U.S., most private employees can be terminated just because the emploer wants to. Absent a union or individual contract that specifieds otherwise, employees work at the pleasure of the employer.
So, use your head. If you use any property that belongs to your employer to do anything your employer isn't paying you to do, you are putting your job at risk.
If you post to your blog only at home, tell the world who you work for, and then post opinion about your employer, you are putting your job at risk.
Is this a free speech issue? No, because your employer is not thwarting your right to post to your blog, even if you are fired.
-- Slashdot: When Public Access TV Says "No"
Mark Pilgrim once blogged about him being a recovering alcoholic. He never blogged about work or the people he worked with. However, the people he worked for at the time found out about the blog, as he was not anonymous and did not take great pains to hide it. Well the company did a really sleazy (and in hindsight stupid) action of asking him to take this information down. They thought customer's knowing this would make the company look bad. Mark refused and was eventually fired. I was definitely on his side for this one. Something's wrong with society if you are embarrassed about alcoholism and this is not the way to handle it, IMHO. It's stupid because Mark is now working for IBM in their corporate blogging division. That former company gave up a prime employee and Mark's making far more money now.
However, a few weeks later a fellow blogger of Mark's was then fired for making comments about a coworker in her blog. Mark took up her side, but as I talked to Mark, and reviewed the comments, it was little more than bitching about someone who was simply a pain in the ass. Okay fine, you work with someone who's a pain in the ass, but would you tell that to that person's face? This is what you are doing. She refused her companies demands to remove the information and she was sacked. Frankly this was just stupid. If you have a problem with someone, you take up with your boss. If you can't fix it, bitching about it in your blog is not going to help. Might make you feel better, but it will make you feel worse when the company has to discipline you.
And I myself was subject to some policy, but this was a common sense situation early in the days of blogging. I blogged at lunch occasionally and I was proud of my site. My boss found out as I had emailed them from home once. So she checked it out and she saw one or two time stamps in the middle of the day. She asked me and I told her this was because I did it at lunch. She asked me if I could minimize the appearance of this (she didn't even ask me to stop!) I simply changed the timestamp on my posts to later in the day after work.
It's ironic, because, some of my topics deal with very confrontational stances on American society and politics. Hell let me be blunt, I flame 90% of americans in most posts. But she never once mentioned anything about content, because I never talk about the company or our customers in any way.
Sometimes, your principles are more important than your job, sometimes your principles are way skewed, and sometimes you just get lucky and work for understanding people. You have to understand what can get you in trouble and what can't, and balance that with what you absolutely have to speak out about.
If you must insult everyone, make sure you have a steady source of income from a private business that doesn't care what you say.
"All great wisdom is contained in .signature files"
There's already rules about what you can and can't say about your employer, why should the web be any different?
My contract with the Navy was not renewed because I made a blog entry on a website that was in no way attached to the military or government (attached below in case you actually care about it). The Navy's point is that if I had said this in a public place, it is OK. However, terrorists can read web pages, so any dissent falls under the Patriot Act.
The blog entry:
I am a bit worried about the project I'm now working on. The project head is supposed to be a Software Engineer. In the few weeks that I've worked with him, I have found that he is completely unable to program in any of the required languages, he knows very little about installing software on a computer, and his knowledge of database administration is limited to what the paperclip guy in MS Access can tell him to do. Further investigation has dug up that he was a telephone support person for a software company, but I don't know how he lost his job. After that, he worked in retail sales at a national men's clothing store. Then, he woke up one day and decided he was a Senior Software Engineer. He flubbed an application to a government contractor, got hired, and is now in charge of this project. Now, if I could just place my finger on what is worrying me about this project...
The previous comment is purposely vague and generalized, but all of the facts are completely true.