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| Authored by: sproggit on Wednesday, May 09 2012 @ 06:22 PM EDT |
In many cases employers today write their employment contracts to
specifically forbid an employee to take information like that to a future
employer.
IBM, for example, have a standard employment contract which states that
they have ownership of any idea you conceive whilst in their employment...
(well, they did have such a clause - it may have been removed).
The law gets convoluted and complex in this area. At what point do the
rights of a company supersede those of an employee? If you had come up
with a brilliant idea to extend the JAVA language, but all your knowledge of
programming and java had come from you employer, who has best claim to
an idea?
It is dangerous to discuss generalisations on this topic, because the
chances are that each company has a unique boilerplate contract of
employment. (Some companies may have several different varieties
depending on the role you hold).
Given that IANAL, it would be foolish and impudent for me to offer any
advice at this point, other than this:
If in *any* doubt, ask a lawyer.
But whilst contemplating this, consider an innocent but dangerous scenario.
You take and idea owned by one employer and implement it in a product
sold by your new employer. Your old employer sues your new employer for
an infringement, and then when they realise that you are the conduit they
sue you as well. Depending on the nature of the infringement - suppose it's
patented - you could from lack of understanding land yourself and your new
employer
It is not something that any one of us would like to do.[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]
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| Authored by: Anonymous on Wednesday, May 09 2012 @ 06:33 PM EDT |
There's little point in trying to extrapolate the consequences of APIs being
copyrightable in phase 1, as such analysis rapidly descends into the nonsense
that stems from having adopted irrational premises.
And unfortunately, it's all due to get a lot worse in phase 2. As PJ described
eloquently if heatedly yesterday, we're deep into the bizarre Holy Territories
of Patentland now, and they make Alice in Wonderland look sane.
Logic and commonsense are not welcome to this party. The lawyers are launching
a deliberate and fully conscious attack on commonsense and public utility,
exhibiting not a shred of social responsibility, and even PJ knows that it is
all wrong.[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]
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