This is a topic that I've been meaning to write about for ages. A recent article from The Register entitled Your boss could own your Facebook profile presents the story of an employee that was forced to hand over his contact list after he left the company, because it was deemed as "work related". If you've not read the article, I'd strongly recommend that you go and take a look because it might just change your outlook on things. Go on to read the comments too and you'll start to realise that, although this isn't a new issue, it's one that's incredibly complicated.

What it all comes down to is the fact that *most* employment contracts have clauses in them stating that whatever you do under their employment belongs to them. That's fair enough. If you work for somebody, everything you do in your day to day work (the intellectual property you create) belongs to them. This is how businesses remain competive in the market and, in theory, stops employees walking into a competitor and doing exactly the same for them.

However, the problems start to arise from the wording on those clauses and you might see statements like the following.

• "related to the business of the Company"
• "that is not in direct competition with the business of the Company"
• "while you are employed by the Company"
• "in the course of your employment with the Company"

Statements like these are all too common but very vague in nature, particularly if you look at "during the course of your employment". What does this mean? During work hours? From commencing employment until leaving it? Who knows, but hopefully you'll start to see how complex this can be.

So given all of this, I have a theory that most of the open source projects are probably owned by the corporate world. If you're reading this, chances are you work in the software industry. Ever contributed to an open source project? That's software, right? Obviously, if you work for a company that builds trading platforms and work on an open source trading platform then this is clearly competition. But where does that line stop and when does something stop be related to the business of your employer? And what if you contribute to open source software using company equipment out of hours? And what if you contribute inside company hours?

Of course, these IPR issues aren't just restricted to software. The article from The Register talks about content that you upload to social networking sites, although the same applies to blogs, forum postings, contributions to standards bodies, etc. As individuals with a new found passion for social networking and non-corporate initiatives, we need to start being more aware of the potential issues around intellectual property rights, the licensing options available to us and, ultimately, we need to start protecting our own IPR wherever we can.

Responses[1]

Posted by Simon Brown on 23 July 2007 21:05:00 BST #