IP Agreements
Modern Intellectual Property Agreements just seem to be a waste of time. In fact, I’ve seen some doozies in my lifetime I’ve refused to sign.
The worst, by far, was for a consulting company that wanted to own ALL THE SOCIAL CONTACTS I made during a contract. Phone numbers, Facebook listings, LinkedIn acceptances, Twitter watchings. Since I am a developer and not a salesperson — and I am not sure how sales handles this since contacts are everything — contacts allow me to improve my programming and make me a better asset on the market. The result of trying to own a developer’s networking is an attempt at stopping them from improving, in fact, its saying “end your career now because you can’t meet anyone without telling us.”
So say you are onsite. You go to a general meeting about company business, and someone you aren’t working with is interested in your Groovy Group outside of work. But since you met them *there* — that IP company would want your connection. But it’s BS. YOu might not even be doing Groovy there, or maybe you both kayak and that’s how you met and the company didn’t teach you to kayak. Or maybe it is work related, but your contract is up, and that connection can get you another gig but you have to turn over his information to this IP company. It’s bad all around.
I feel the same about most general IP agreements. Certainly, I understand that a company wants to protect its technology. I will do my darndest to protect their business if they’ve asked me to work for them, and I’ll sign an agreement to protect it. But, I’m not selling out my intellectual freedom for a buck. It’s career death.
Even some Consulting companies, that *only* have headhunters and salespeople (the “contact” episode was like this) want you to sign a general agreement like this. Let’s see — a company that does no technology at all except placement wants to own all my rights to compilers, algorithms, and inventions I work during a gig they arranged to a real tech company? And these agreements are written so grayly that if I learned HTML5 on the contract they arranged, then after that at a non-related gig created a widget with it they would want to own it “because I had obtained the knowledge on their watch.” I am totally serial about this.
The Spice, Will Not Flow (Consequences)
Great companies, or maybe used to be great, encouraged innovation and break-offs of employees. For instance, HP used to have a great policy of letting employees go to pursue new inventions and may have even backed them with capital. A spin-off of Medtronic, Guidant, was due to an invention of a lithium battery for a pacemaker.
We aren’t talking about idea theft, we are talking about the combination of a special person, with special experiences, in special circumstance — the right time and person and place — who then invents something great. I do not know how a company can own this.
As I perused on particular agreement recently, I thought — gosh I’d have to give up my meetup group I started because anything contemporary I talk about on a current contract is an idea owned by this new company. If I saw an improvement at work, that I could ask the manager “you mind if we add this to the open source plugin?” If that was stopped, then any new ideas and use cases for improvement, heck, even free labor on the problem would stop.
And what about just personal improvement? I do mostly Java. I use Java at home. How do we separate all that?
What Constitutes Something Owned By A Company?
In my opinion, the final product is what is a company’s property. If you string together Alfresco, some J2EE libraries, Spring, a bunch of CSS branding particular to that company, some algorithms and workflows — well you can’t copy them unless they agree to it. Data domains of course, for the most part, are proprietary. Of course, since we are all facing the same problems and something like a Rails framework comes along, well then, that’s not the company’s property.
But interesting things happen. One thing is — the Jenkins/Hudson fork. Hudson used to be open source, Oracle bought it; an open source Jenkins fork was created and everyone moved to it. So how was it we didn’t see a huge lawsuit on that one? of course I suspect there have been lawsuits somewhere.
In a small list of things I’ve worked on, include a free market health care application, product information sites for electronics, power failure monitoring software, health care record processing, law library software, clinical examination room software, toxic substances databases, retail sites city licensing and regulatory systems, medical device information systems; just for starters. those whole systems belong to those companies. Maybe there is a particular algorithm, like a Monte Carlo implementation, that they own.
But what about all the content repositories, databases, class upon class of millions of lines of code, annotations, implementations, automation scripts — all those techniques across all business I figured out or fixed or worked on . . . standard Ant implementations, java upgrades, operating system debugs, domain processing languages. And some company comes along and says it owns all that accumulated information, knowledge, and techniques I developed over the years but just the stuff during their particular contract.
If companies want to stop competition, then, they will try to force these out of control, generalized IP agreements. They will also stop innovation.
I don’t know what can give a business the edge. It could be a piece of timely technology implementation. But, I remember a company that was using Node to do concurrent, real time updates — and they thought that they had done this made the idea theirs. No, just the implementation is theirs. A lot of other companies are doing this too because that’s what the tool does. If an employee working on the same project moves from one company to another, should they just not bring in their experience? If not, where is progress, and what makes a developer more salable over time?
A book I often quote is Plato’s Theatetus. The lesson in that was, the parts do not equal the whole. I would say, the developer owns the parts, but the company owns the whole.