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Company Laptop, My Data — Can They Co-exist?
An anonymous reader writes "I recently replaced my old laptop. The owner of my company heard about this and offered to reimburse me for it, since he knows I have and will continue to do company work on my own hardware. I'd like the extra $1,250, but I think if I accept his offer that legally he has the right to any data on it (personal emails, files, blog posts, etc.). Even if I decide to put my personal stuff on a second drive, I'm worried that using company property to save and write to separate storage still gives them the right to it. The apps (Office, etc.) are my own licenses. We do not have a policy that intellectual property developed using company assets belongs to the company. But, if I figured out the One Great Internet Business Idea or write the Great American Novel and used the company laptop to do it, it's an avenue they could use to claim they own it. Unlikely, but scary. How many Slashdotters have been in this situation, and what agreement did you and your management come up with?"
Use the laptop to remote in to your home computer and do your personal business on there.
If they just want to reward you for working on your own hardware, a bonus is the way to go.
Do you Gentoo!?
Use online web stuff.
Unlikely, but scary.
Your fears are not unfounded. As someone who has had "e-mail forensics" done on his company's MS Exchange during an investigation of a coworker, I can assure you that while it may not be something that you've done to trigger this it does happen. And nobody wants to be in a compromising position should their relationship with their employer goes bad.
So your solution is simple: send him an e-mail explaining that this new laptop is going to function as your main personal laptop with family photos and videos and whatnot. Tell him that you'd love to accept the $1,250 as an award or included with your next paycheck as special compensation but the laptop won't be inventoried or tagged by the company. Make it clear it's your property and not a company asset. Offer to bring in the invoice for him to look at if he's concerned you're buying a car with it instead and get it in writing. If you get the money awarded to you to do with as you see fit but you have an informal agreement that this will go toward your personal laptop, everything should be fine.
My work here is dung.
If there's doubt, then you cannot.
No.
Don't do it.
See my journal for slashdot ID's by year. Mine created in 2005. http://slashdot.org/journal/289875/slashdot-ids-by-year
I wont even allow my company to reimburse me for flash drives for this reason. It's way better to be safe when it comes to your personal data.
My sausage tree didn't grow, does that make me a bad mommy?
You need to ask a lawyer. His answer will depend, at least in part, on documents you have signed as part of your employment, and on state law.
Personally, I know my company is too confused to ever go after me, my data, and my ideas after I leave, so long as I don't compete directly with them. I don't worry about their supposed ownership of my every thought and dream, despite signing those rights over to them.
A slashdotter who didn't build his own computer is like a Jedi who didn't build his own lightsaber.
Do everything in your power to keep your data and theirs separate. In fact I'd even recommend you stop doing their work on your hardware.
If they want to provide you with a company machine then let them.
XML is a known as a key material required to create SMD: Software of Mass Destruction
At my previous company, we went the other direction...no personal equipment was allowed. If you needed a tool (e.g. a laptop), it was provided.
We didn't want the liability of damage or theft of someone's personal equipment. Further, we didn't want to deal with things like users bringing in tools that impact the network, we didn't want to have any issues with software licensing (who provides or you bring in non-licensed software), etc. We also had problems with people bringing in things like printers and then having the company pay for ink (that gets expensive) or wireless routers and creating new and unauthorized access points. Beyond even things like people wanting to bring in their own [monitor, video card, sound card, speakers, desktop, etc], we unfortunately faced the issue of dealing with these things (prior to the policy) when on rare occasions someone was fired and IT had to dismantle a PC, etc.
I guess I'm a fan of keeping work and personal apart.
It creates an expectation that you will provide your own tools in every circumstance, and you shouldn't be subsidizing your company in any case. Create a line between your personal and business life or you will find that your personal life will erode away. That isn't fair to you or those in your personal life. No matter how much you love your job, it's still just a job at the end of the day. Don't be a sucker.
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Nothing to it.
Depending on the tax code where you live, something like this might be required anyway, as it'll be seen as either payment or benefits.
So - go all out. Either have him add the cost of your laptop to your pay check as a one time bonus (bring a copy of the receipt so they can see the price), or have them buy the laptop and give it to you as a gift along with papers showing that it is indeed your laptop and not the company's.
Personally I'd prefer the one time bonus. I'm buying the laptop anyway, I need it, and I'm effectively getting a company sponsored discount with none of the drawbacks.
Why not take the $1250, buy a second, identical laptop for personal use and set up an external drive that you could use to sync files between the two if necessary (or even a shared drive for professional purposes)?
If you go this route, make sure you never accidentally put personal stuff on the professional laptop.
I think the real question is why you're asking Slashdot instead of sitting down with your boss and hashing these issues out directly.
Aren't they cute when they are young and so naïve?
See my journal for slashdot ID's by year. Mine created in 2005. http://slashdot.org/journal/289875/slashdot-ids-by-year
But, if I figured out the One Great Internet Business Idea or write the Great American Novel and used the company laptop to do it, it's an avenue they could use to claim they own it.
I don't know what Company you work for, but MOST companies force you to sign a contract at time of employment that basically claims that anything you create while you are employed by the company is legally theirs. Any code you write, any works you produce they could technically sue you for if you suddenly turned around and actually made a decent bit of money off of them. Yes, this includes things you write in the middle of the night on a weekend on your personal computer.
Does this mean they're going to try and claim your profits at the Church Arts and Crafts fair or try and claim they own the game you sell for $2 on your website? No. But they do this for several reasons. One is to protect their own asses... while you're busy coding at Adobe for their Great New Photoshop, you can't go home and use the ideas, even those YOU came up with at work, to create "Joe's Photomall" and suddenly turn around and start undercutting photoshop. Another reason is pure greed... if you suddenly have this great idea and write a 5kb Operating System that runs everything, it's THEIR great idea if you actually coded it while you were employed under them and _they_ get the rights to it, not you.
Yes, there have been cases where this has come up, and it is usually up to the (ex)employee to prove that they created the code or whatever either before or after they were under employment.
Just an FYI... I would check up on your contracts if you think this may be a problem.
P.S. IANAL so I could be mistaken.
That's the most important part of your post. I'm not a lawyer either, but I'm fairly confident that materials developed on company time or company property are defined as "work product" in a "work for hire" environment. I'd be extremely wary of presuming natural rights. The law is rarely completely reasonable, and work product is no exception.
Set it up as a loan from the company to purchase the laptop, payable over x months. If you leave before x months, you owe the remainder, if you stay the full x months, you don't have to repay it. That way the laptop is yours, not the companies.
A copyright assignment must be in writing. The exception is if it is work done by an employee in the course and scope of employment, but I doubt that writing the Great American Novel is in his job description. And if it were, the company would own it, whether or not they reimburse him for the laptop. So, while I hasten to point out that this is not legal advice, if the company owns your copyrights, they probably already own it by virtue of the employment agreement. They cannot purchase your copyrights by reimbursing you for a laptop. Note that there may, of course, be other ramifications. For example, if the laptop is "their" property, they may acquire certain "shop rights" if you use it to develop a technology that you later patent. And of course, the real answer is "get a lawyer if you're concerned about it." Of course, hiring a lawyer can easily exceed the reimbursement you get, so you've got to look at the tradeoffs.
Today's Sesame Street was brought to you by the number e.
I work from home for a company that isn't in my state, but I also do independent work and have my own small company. I don't want a seperate machine for each place, so for my main employer, I have a monthly stipend added to my pay for the use of personal computers, printers, office supplies, etc. This way I still own the equipment, but I also get some money for it's wear and tear, etc. Of course this means I pay for repairs and supplies out of pocket when they are needed, but over time it evens out.
Do -not- use personal equipment for company use.
Okay, I admit I do it. I have a $20 keyboard and $15 mouse that I brought in. But if something happened and I never saw them again, 'oh well'. They don't store any data, and they have no value other than their replacement value.
A laptop? Are you insane!?
Take the $1250, the company now owns the laptop. Do your personal stuff on a computer you actually own.
KEEP THEM SEPARATE.
"If you make people think they're thinking, they'll love you; But if you really make them think, they'll hate you." - DM
Take the check for $1,250 and use it to buy a new laptop. You get a free laptop that you use for work-only, and keep the other one for personal stuff. I call that the best of both worlds.
You can lead a horse to water, but you can't make it dissolve.
If he gives you money to buy the PC, who does it belong to? If it is yours, then they have no say on it. If it is theirs, then they might have a say in it.
Ask HIM what the situation is by email. That way you have a trace if anything goes sour in two years or so. The worst that can happen is that he decides that it is THEIR machine. At least then you know what the situation is.
I would think that if they are willing to give you that amount of money, they will also be willing to answer any questions you have about it.
A solution depends also on what rights you have on that PC. If you have admin rights, you could use encryption. As it is a Portable, you could use encryption anyway. That way when you loose the machine or it is stolen, the company data is secure as well.
Make either a separate encrypted partition for yourself or use the hidden part of Truecrypt for your own files. That way you can even give the sysadmin of the company the login, in case you are hit by a bus.
That way your data is secure and private, while the companies is secure as well.
If you do not have the admin rights (and don't want to hack them) then an external drive and/or USB stick can be the answer. e.g. at home an external drive for everything and a USB stick for on the road.
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
Well, I'm an IT Manager and we've done stuff like this, if the licenses belong to him and the president of my company wanted to give him some money to help we wouldn't claim ownership. If we want to claim ownership we purchase the equipment and file all the necessary paperwork and inform them of their rights. I believe it's possible to separate work and personal time even in this age. We try to be nice around here. You are however correct, and more so then I am in in the larger scope of things.
I'm like a superhero, but with no powers or motivation.
Thank the boss for the offer, but make it clear that you don't want to blur the lines of ownership regarding your laptop and the associated software licenses. Suggest that, if he still wants to compensate you for all you do using your personal equipment on your own time, if he would consider making the payment a one-time cash bonus. That way, the payment is associated with wages and cannot be construed as being an employer reimbursement for business equipment to be used at home.
I use irony whenever I can, but my shirts are still wrinkled...
I was going to buy a cell phone, from a carrier that had better coverage in the areas I frequented than the cell phones provided by the company. As they were getting ready to get another cell phone anyway, I asked that the one assigned to me be reassigned, and that if I used my new personal phone for business they pay for those minutes or give me a stipend for phone use. Instead, they bought me a phone of the type and carrier I wanted, and said they would rather pay for personal calls than to hassle with the paperwork the stipend or reimbursement of the calls. It worked fine for years, then one day they called me in and said pack up and get out, hand over the keys and your phone. There was no time to pull off my phone list, or delete any text messages. I had some of the numbers in other places, but not all of them. And, I had to quickly go out and get a new phone and update everyone with the new number. Now, I carry two phones, one is mine,. one is theirs, and business and personal never combine. I would do the same with the laptop. But, I would make them buy the laptop, not take the money and buy one with it. That way there is no doubt which machine is theirs.
Why, without your clothes, you're naked, Miss Dudley!
#4, Why not use a USB stick as a complete Ubuntu workstation? Here are instructions to make a stick that will either run in a QEMU window on a host Windows OS, _or_ you can simply boot-up directly into Ubuntu?
http://www.pendrivelinux.com/all-in-one-pendrivelinux-2008/
So you can have your cake and eat it too. During work hours, just insert your USB stick when you need access to your own PC.
First you need to prove it is yours (onus on you, at the spur of that moment - so tape the receipt to the drive) - to the person walking you out, with you while you grab your personal stuff. Secondly, they will want to remove any company from the drive, and won't take your word for it that there ain't none. So the now pissed off IT slave will scrape through your personal stuff anyway...
Many companies sort out what's yours and theirs after walking you out, so you're short on luck in that scenario.
If you're really doing something of value on your own, be very serious about keeping your own work and your employer's work separate. When I did this, the work I was doing at home was on a different kind of computer than I used at work, in a different subject area. I even used a different color of scratch pad for my own work (yellow for the employer, green for my own work). For the employer's work, I used blue pens; for my own work, black pens of a different brand. No paper or media associated with my own work ever entered the employer's premises.
This is a hassle. It is far less hassle than the litigation required to untangle things if you succeed at what you're doing.
It worked out very well for me, and I was able to retire before I was 40.
My story is different, but some issues in it may be of interest.
There was a clasue in my employment contract stating that anyting I did of a copyrightable nature while employed belonged to the company, even if I did it outside of office hours on my own computer. The verbal assurance of the manager who hired me (he was one of the company's founders and my PhD thesis supervisor) was that they would not enforce the copyright ownership if whatever I did was irrelevant to the company's business, but he said it would be polite for me to ask for transfer of copyright ownership if I was to do something for myself.
Several years later, the manager who hired me had moved to a different part of the company. I did start to write stuff for myself. I did ask my (new) manager for a transfer of copyright ownership. In principle, he was happy to do this, but he had to run it past the legal department and get the CTO to proofread the draft of my book to ensure it didn't say anything embarrassing to the company. Of course, looking after the core business of the company and meeting quarterly revenue targets took a higher priority than dealing with my request, so the transfer of copyright ownership took 6 months. That was for the first book I wrote. It took 8 months for the second book. The point I am making is that if your employment contract states you own the copyright of non-work-related stuff that you write on your own time then that will save you from dealing with frustratingly slow bureaucracy.
I work in the consultancy and training department of the company, so I travel a lot. For this I need a laptop. It would have been impractical to carry 2 laptops with me: a company one and a personal one. So when I was working out details of the transfer of copyright ownership, I requested that I be able to keep my own stuff on the company laptop. Both my boss and the legal department were concerned with the possibility of "my stuff" and "company stuff" getting inter-mingeled on the same disk drive. We solved this concern by me buying a compact flash card and a compact-flash-to-PCMCIA-card adapter. I put these into the PCMCIA card slot on my laptop and used it as a separate drive for "my stuff". (By the way, I discovered that Windows has dreadfully slow drivers for accessing flash-based devices, but Linux has very fast drivers.) I got a written letter stating that I owned a "project" that was on the PCMCIA-card drive if my employer pre-approved the "project". The need to get pre-approval for projects was irritating-but-tolerable for a few years. Eventually, I paid off my mortgage and my wife's university fees. At that point, I realised that I could afford to live on far less money, so I negotiated to switch from being a full-time employee to being a part-time one. Suddenly the issue of copyright ownership became a non-issue because under UK law the company can demand copyright ownership only for what I do during the part-time work hours; what I develop under the rest of my time is automatically mine. I have been blissfully happy ever since.
One last point. About a year ago I bought a netbook. It's powerful enough for the needs of my projects--running PowerPoint, LaTeX and developing small C++/Java programs with "vi" and "make" or "ant"--your mileage may vary. I plug the netbook into an external monitor and keyboard when working in my home office. When I travel on company business, the netbook is small enough for me to carry it and the company laptop. So now I have a more complete physical separation between "company stuff" and "my stuff" and I don't have to endure Windows' slow drivers for flash-based disks.
...not in our company :) All USB boot options are firmware disabled, as well as booting from any CDs. If the default specified HDD doesn't boot, someone from support with a BIOS password has to get in and reset the machine to enable this, and the BIOS settings are editable by a software app from within windows to re-disable this feature once an image is installed.
on many systems across the company, the USB ports are disabled entirely. generally, only execs and select machines in the suppoort areas have USB enabled. Nothing has an optical writer. SD and other memory card readers on laptops are disabled, and all HDDs are either BIOS locked, or encrpyted to both prevent them from being stolen, and to prevent other HDDs from being booted internally.
It's a bit extreme, but we have more than 15,000 employees with access to PCs, and sensitive data on millions of americans... We have to take precautions.
We also have no wifi at all, NAC devices scanning all ports, and MAC address tracking of all assets.
There is no contest in life for which the unprepared have the advantage.
Where the OS is loaded from or where data gets saved is irrelevant. If the company's position is that it owns the laptop, and an employee uses it to create something, the company can reasonably argue in court that it owns the created work.