Perth Game Company CEO Takes IP By Night

snicho99 writes "A US owned gaming company has fled Australia, leaving unpaid employees and a massive tax bill. Apparently many staff have been working unpaid for months to allow their game to ship and hopefully the company to recover. Interzone's Perth (Western Australia) office was created with the assistance of a state government grant. Last week Interzone's (American) CEO entered the building at night and removed all the servers and IP so that Interzone could continue production at a new company they have opened in Ireland. The staff caught him on camera. More background here."

Comments

Re:Other countries are interesting

[TheRaven64]

You have three choices:

1. Leave with one month of your salary unpaid and write it off as a mistake.
2. Leave with one month of your salary unpaid, sue the company, force them to declare bankruptcy, still don't get your money, and still have to pay the court costs.
3. Work for another month, get the product finished and get all of your back pay plus a bonus if the company makes enough money from selling the product to stay afloat.

Which do you choose? The second option is a waste of time. The first is a guaranteed loss. The third is a gamble, where you potentially have a bigger loss, but potentially have a gain. I know people working for small businesses who have received nice bonuses for choosing option 3, and others who have had the company fold owing them back pay. If you don't have another job lined up to start immediately, it's often a good idea to try to keep the company afloat while you look for other employment as a backup.

Re:Call wikipedia

[Nursie]

I find that attitude patronising in the extreme. Many more than 1% are engineers. Engineering practice is defied by the discipline not some god of engineering and there are many good sets of practices in the industry.

Personally, I design and implement high throughput, low latency server software that deals with mission critical data and/or financial transactions. I consider myself an engineer. Please don't pull out either of the old fallacies that engineers are either personally, legally, responsible for any failing in their work (demonstrably untrue in civil or other engineering firms where the company may be responsible but the individual is not) or that "you're an engineer when the thing you designed kills someone if it goes wrong" because that puts many electronic engineers in the "not engineer" camp and many software guys in the engineer camp.

Is every programmer a "Software Engineer"? I don't know, but I dislike the dismissive attitude.

Re:Call wikipedia

[Antique Geekmeister]

No, it's interesting that the manager showed up and seized the equipment without an opportunity for employees to clear personal data or office possessions. That's pretty unusual.

I've seen small companies closing their doors under different, but similarly awful circumstances. (Power being cut, losing their network feed due to non-payment, unpaid-for equipment being seized, etc.) An important rule for employees facing such troubles is to make sure you have all legal documents in off-site backup. Follow your contracts, but make sure your payment records, stock information, signed contracts, etc. are available offline. And consider whether to back up your work and email offsite or on separate media: I've actually been offered a return consulting job to come back and reconstruct work that I'd done and they'd deleted all source code for, as part of purging my old accounts. Since I;d been there as a corporate partner, and they tried to pay me under the table and not notify my company, I contacted our sales and legal departments. It turned out they hadn't paid six months of outstanding bills, and hiring me behind my company's back would have been much cheaper for them and much more profitable for me, but would have left my employer with much less leverage to get paid.

Fortunately for me, the key work I'd done had actually already been submitted to the relevant open source project's main codelines, so it wasn't lost. And they hadn't noticed the explanations in my contract about what working on GPL tools nad publishing them to that client meant, that they were under GPL. We actually managed to get them to cough up at least some of the backpay, mostly for explaining where to to get the updates.

Re:Call wikipedia

[u38cg]

Interestingly, this is almost exactly what the US headquarters of Lehman Brothers did immediately before the collapse - repatriated all the cash from overseas operations to pay US staff and creditors before anyone else.

Re:Not nice.

[TapeCutter]

I stand corrected, apparently the scheme was brought in by the Howard government and I was using outdated personal anecdote. My brother-in-law lost ~$10K when the panel beaters he was working for in the 90's went tits up. Part of that $10K was super that had not been paid for almost a year. The bank came in and auctioned all the equipment in the shop, the employees saw none of the proceeds.

Thanks for the education. :)