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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.
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?
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.
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 :)
...
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.
It's refreshing to see an American CEO that actually knows enough about his own company to know what to steal.
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...
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