Slashdot Mirror
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."
A CEO may pay what His he wishes to His employees and take what He wants.
By His accumulation wealth, a CEO has demonstrated His worldly talent and divine favor. Far be it for us to criticize His actions: are we yet men, while He has a golden MBA? While we merely use our power of Speech, does the CEO not expand the language with outflowing of His prodigious mind? Does that not giveth unto him wisdom we know not, and authority we dare not assert?
We should open our hearts to the CEO. We shall work for Him all our waking hours and offer unto him our wives and daughters for His amusement: for we should be honored to have a radiant Being in our lives as the prime-most consideration.
Should we Fail, we deserve whatever punishment the CEO shall mete out for He, as he so frequently reminds us, is infallible. If a CEO's Company should fail, it is our fault for being indolent, and we shall bear that around our necks. All the remaining resources of a failed Company will go to its CEO as compensation for even attempting to deal with filty being like ourselves. Amen.
Remember that it's not so bad to leave a country to do business elsewhere. When I worked in Naples, I would not get almost any pay. Yes, I was a kid and I was supposed to work for my father, but I wanted something off from it. If it doesn't work like you want to, you go somewhere where it does.
It IS so bad when you use a bunch of legal dodgery to take ownership of the IP while evading the millions of dollars of debt that you owe to the staff. It IS bad when you break a whole bunch of laws to get that IP out of the country, so you can start another studio in another country without actually paying what you owe to any of your employees. And (personal conjecture here) it IS bad when you will most likely you will do exactly the same to the new studio.
Disclaimer: IAAFIZE. I am a former IZ employee.
Rampant carbon sequestration destroyed the Dinosaurs' tropical paradise. I'm here to help repair the damage.
Oh, yuck. I prefer my toilets to flush the shit out of my house not into it.
Interzone owns the Australia Tax Office (ATO) approximately $1m AUD and $500k in unpaid wages and superannuation. The owner changed the locks on the firm at 4am in the morning, locking all employees out from their work. Not even given a chance to collect their personal belongings. A new 'Interzone' called Big Collision is being setup in Dublin Ireland to complete development of their game Futebol in time for the World Cup, and without the debt they have accumulated in Australia. Originally Interzone was given a grant by the Western Australian goverment of $500k, so this has blown up very big on the news there, causing quite some political issues and questions of the chief Treasurer. They did not even lay off the staff, as that would of caused paper work, and the paying out of their due wages and redundancy money. They were simple locked out from their building.
The firm that provides the middleware (BigWorld) based in Sydney, provided a server engineer (contracted by Mike to clear out the IP assets from the server.)
The Interzone employees have been fantastic, in collecting evidence, and staying together to fight for what they are due.
This is not the first time this has occured in Australia, similar shit has happened in the last year with firms Transmission, and Fuzzyeyes. Video games, one of the last places for cow-boy businessmen.
For people who would like to read more on this, check these links:
http://www.tsumea.com/australasia/australia/news/120210/interzone-games-perth-closes-staff-locked-out
http://www.kotaku.com.au/2010/02/wa-dev-interzone-games-close-to-liquidation/
http://www.kotaku.com.au/2010/02/interzone-ceo-marty-brickey-responds/
And this video where the employees confront one of the directors http://vimeo.com/9574704
Er, no, RTFS - he removed the servers.
This is the one time that referring to "IP theft" actually makes sense. He stole it, removing the original rather than duplicating.
Do people who commit piracy do so by going to the record companies at night, sneaking in, and removing their CDs?
Anyhow, where does anyone accuse him of stealing? Or are you just making up a straw man?
I don't see what the problem is: If they worked unpaid by choice, then they're foolish, in my not so humble opinion, and here's why: Having been cheated before, I'd not trust even family or friends when it comes to my financial future, and certainly not an employer.
Work for free? Sorry, been there, done that, much in the same way as these people: I trusted the company's owner, believed him when he said that he'd reward me and the rest of us, if we were only patient and worked hard. It would all work out in the end, you see, and everyone would end up wealthy.
Yeah, right. The only person that ended up wealthy was him - he sold the company, and the people that had worked to build it up got nothing, and had no recourse, as we had nothing in writing.
As the saying goes: "Once burned, twice shy". I'm older now, and considerably more cynical, and I don't work for any employer for free, ever. The only thing that we have is our lives, and we cannot know how much time we have: Giving it away to an employer without recompense is foolish at best, because they never remember the sacrifices you made for them, and you can never get that time back.
Always keep that in mind when dealing with an employer: You're trading your life in exchange for money. Make sure that it's worth it to you, don't ever be surprised when someone tries to cheat you and don't let them do so.
But that's retarded. They had little reason to do that other than some profoundly misplaced loyalty
The only reason the loyalty was misplaced was because the CEO screwed them. Had he honored their commitment and worked as hard as possible to save the company and then paid them back dues + bonus/stock their loyalty would have been dead on. Unfortunately they worked for a douchebag. I'm the first person to have no loyalty for a large mega corp but small shops require it. We can't function without the employees giving a damn about the company and the company can't function without giving a damn about their employees.
The Goal: A long simple life filled with many complex toys.
up is down in Australia
rewriting history since 2109
I believe the saying you're looking for is:
Fool me once, shame on — shame on you. Fool me — you can't get fooled again.
- Former President Bush
When you're afraid to download music illegally in your own home, then the terrorists have won!
Actually....
First is the employees super funds, then taxes, then wages, then everyone else they owe money to.
The employees are covered for loss of wages by the GEERS scheme, which they can submit and get their: Lost wages; Lost holiday pay; Redundancy payout (according to industry standards or their contract, and if contract its subject to evaluation).
According to Australian law anyway :)
...
Hard luck there for all the people who just got scammed by a run of the mill business asshole. My theory is that they are all lying assholes, each and every one of them, and if you keep that in mind you'll find your dealings with them go much better. Just remind yourself as they speak that every word is carefully selected to make them richer.
Big tip - the day you find your pay hasn't gone into your account is the day you hit jobsearch.com or call your agent and let them know you're looking for paid work.
The business's responsibility is to ensure there is enough cash set aside against bad luck/planning/weather and enough cash flow coming through to ensure projects get completed. It's *their* responsibility, not yours...you write code, or run tests, answer the phones. If they've f*ed up enough to not have the money to even pay the people who write the product, then you have to wonder how else they are screwing up.
All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain.
Has anyone else noticed the picture of Mike Turner with the Sphinx in the background halfway down the third page linked to in TFS? The caption below it is surely a little redundant...
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.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
"We may have a ridiculous amount of asian immigrants that still speak chinese/japanese after they get here, but that still does not make us a part of asia."
We actually have very few Japanese immigrants but they do love spending their holidays and money here, particularly in Queensland where the local economy is heavily dependent on tourisim.
The Japanese are golf mad and a golf trip to Oz to play on a real golf course is cheaper than a golf club membership in Tokyo to play on a multi story driving range. On the whole they are very well mannered guests in our country and tend to stick to organised tour groups because of the language barrier.
Also every chineese immigrant I have ever met speaks english, it's a requirement to get into the country unless you come in as a refugee and we do not recognise people from China as refugees.
As you probably know there is a minority racist element in our population who idolise people such as Pauline Hanson. Hanson is ironically now emmigrating to the UK after basically being ridiculed and laughed out of politics by the rest of us. I think she is in for a shock when she finds out how many second and third generation "brown people" are wandering around the UK.
For the non-Aussie readers, members of Hansen's minority are generally refered to as "yobbos", which when translated into American means "rednecks".
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
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.
It's refreshing to see an American CEO that actually knows enough about his own company to know what to steal.
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.
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.
[FUCK BETA]
I don't know the Australian systems you describe but your summary makes them sound a lot like Affirmative Action here in the US. This is a tough question. There is no question that AA is prejudice and, depending on implementation, racist. However, as it is there to correct a past wrong, the hard part is deciding when it is still or no longer needed. We are struggling with this question still in the US, as evidence by the recent University of Michigan case on admissions.
One major issue here is whether the "need" for AA is perceived to be "over" in some areas (such as the North) but the opposite in others (like the South)... I waffle a bit on this issue myself. I'd personally prefer no law or regulation mentioning race (thus invalidating AA) but that is based on the assumption that racism and inequality is no longer an issue... which is only true in some places.
Come play Moral Decay!
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.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
An increasing number of programmers over the years have started calling themselves engineers, and it truly bothers me. This source of ire came to a head 2 years ago when I needed to hire engineers that also knew how to program. Being in Seattle, 99% of the applicants advertised themselves as engineers, and while many of them were intelligent and very well versed in programming principles and practices, not a single one of them knew anything about what would be learned in engineering school.
Here are some examples of interviewing questions I made to lend understanding of the distinction I had to make between programmers and engineers:
What is a Fourier (or Laplace) transform?
What is a convolution?
What is an RMS mean compared to an average?
What is a duty cycle?
How do you apply Kirchoff's law to a circuit?
What is the time constant of an RC circuit, and what does it mean?
What is the resonance frequency of an RLC circuit?
What is the nyquist frequency?
What does a PID controller do?
What is a normal force?
What is Colomb's Law?
What conditions are needed to change 2 sandwiched diodes into a transistor?
Explain what a conduction band is.
What is a triple point for a material?
What happens to the orbitals of atoms as they are brought closer together?
How can you make steel conduct heat better, and what are the drawbacks?
What is metal fatigue on the micro or nanoscopic level?
What is Newton's Law of Cooling?
What does the Reynolds number tell you?
What is a Carnot engine and why is it special?
What should the flow velocity be directly on a surface experiencing laminar flow?
Programmers had a higher chance of answering the few questions at the top compared to the bottom, but one thing was painfully clear: those who had learned engineering knew most of the answers, and programmers calling themselves engineers usually knew none. This particular list covers many disciplines, but this list actually covers what you'd need to know as a COMPUTER ENGINEER to pass the fundamentals of engineering exam. Computer Scientists simply do not learn an engineering background to have this kind of knowledge.
As a practicing engineer that has seen programmers severely injure people, blow up objects, and burn circuitry due to their lack of engineering knowledge, the fundamental distinction I draw between an engineer and programmer is that a programmer mostly deals with concepts and ideas entirely created by humans, where engineers are forced to understand and deal with nature itself on an everyday basis.
To clarify this point, I usually liken programmers to mathematicians: Good ones are usually scientists and have to constantly utilize the scientific method to get their job done, and their work is constantly invoked by the world on a regular basis, but generally their work routinely deals with abstractions and hierarchies, and they can do their job quite well without understanding how the physical world works. Indeed, some of the best programmers I've ever known have built amazingly efficient "engines" without ever knowing how the physical components they rely upon are designed or operate on a physical level.
I will grudingly admit that there clearly is a fuzzy line between engineer and programmer, but it falls squarely within the Computer Engineering discipline. Some of us "code" in hardware, where the chip physics is our syntax, making us much more in the engineering camp, and some of us move entirely into the machine/instruction language regime, where an understanding of the computer science of creating an abstract algorithm and less of the physics come more into play, making those of us closer to computer science. By the time you get beyond chips reading machine language, the man-made abstract meaning of the 1s and 0s are what fill your mind entirely, leaving the physics to someone else, and that science of crafting a decently run representation is called programming.
The fact that you could go on to craft entire systems using black boxes that operate as you command means that while your efforts are certainly complex and necessary, it is not engineering.
AccountKiller
I always think it's hysterical when American engineers get so up in arms about "mere" programmers daring to call themselves engineers. In the UK, the status of Chartered Engineer is given to trained, professional engineers in many disciplines. Each discipline has it's own professional body who are permitted to issue the certification, and guess what? The BCS (British Computer Society) are one of those bodies, and can award CEng status to suitably qualified people. There's no mention of having to understand Newtonian Mechanics as a prerequisite...
---- Den ene knappen er powerknapp, den andre er Bender voice knapp "Bite My Shiny Metal Ass"