It has nothing to do with you skillset, and everything to do with competing with your employer. Do you think it is okay to try to get work from your employer’s clients? How about directly competing with the same kind of business?
If he had a great idea, the ethical thing to do would be for him to quit his job and take the risk of designing new dolls. California law prevents a company from preventing a former employee from making a living. But it sounds like this guy took money while designing a doll who would compete with his employer’s product line.
I haven’t seen anything saying Mattel turned down the idea. Even if they did, they may have done so because the new dolls would split the market for Barbie. That is their right. Is there any evidence he offered them money to take his idea elsewhere?
An article linked to by the article in the OP said the sculpts for all the Bratz dolls are similar, which is why the judge found the entire line to be infringing. If he started with a Barbie sculpt, which would be Mattel proprietary info, then he is a thief.
If you copied the code for the website, and changed the name and a few minor details for the gaming one, then you’d be a thief. If I took software I developed at work, downloaded it onto my home computer, did some minor changes, and sold it, I’d be a thief. In Silicon Valley people move around all the time, and most people understand that you take your skills but not your former employer’s proprietary information, even if you created it.
In a similar case, an EDA company called Avant! was found to have begun with code from another company, taken by a founder, which helped it get its new product to market faster. and basically shut down.
If someone wants to compete with a new idea, they should have the guts to quit and do it, and not shit on the hand that feeds them.
You make a valid point. That’s another reason for my ambivalence toward the Bratz. In spite of the trashy clothes and makeup, I was happy that they began to make dolls of different ethnic groups, just like the little girls who play with them. Of the Bratz dolls my daughter has, her favorite is the Asian one, Jade. We’re not Asian, and she only knows one or two Asian kids at school. I like the whole “we’re all different, but we’re still friends” message. But do they have to dress like whores?
Have some examples of companies suing for rights to inventions in totally unrelated fields? They might decide to not look like dicks. Lots of paid writers write novels on their own time - I don’t recall an instance of a company suing for rights to it.
If you have a great idea, it is a simple matter to get specific clearance for it. If it is truly unrelated to your work, it should be no problem. I assume you’d document your invention in a lab notebook or something, at home, to establish priority. If the company really thought it great, you might get the benefit of being a lead designer without financial risk to you. Maybe no big royalties, but no doubt promotions and raises.
And like I said, if it is really such a great idea find a VC and quit.
I think and I’m going by memory here; was that they were supposed to be the anti-barbie. Instead of this OC lifestyle that Barbie had, these dolls were supposed to be from the big city, full of rap and grunge and girls who weren’t afraid of make-up or hip huggers, but who were still GOOD girls; as opposed to Barbie who dressed like quaker, but was known to bathe in the blood of babies, let Ken burn her with cigarettes and pimp her ass out for to pay for his townhouse.
Got a response to his very valid questions? It is not a matter of what the dolls look like, but that the inventor did his inventing while employed by Mattel.
That’s why the Chinese knockoffs are legal. You can’t trademark or patent the concept of unrealistically boobaceous blond dolls, just the specifics of a Barbie. I suspect there would be no problem with them if they had been independently developed.
I agree with you 100% from a righteous indignation point of view, but it pretty much all comes down to what the employee and employer voluntarily agreed to, doesn’t it?
And no, I haven’t read the contract (is it public?), so I can’t say how I would have ruled if I were the judge.
Sure it’s bullshit. But that’s a topic for another thread: should such contracts be legal, or is there some better, less one-sided way to handle such negotiations than giving the employer all the cards? In general labor relations, the legalization of unions tipped managment’s hand; maybe there needs to be a revolution in contract law as well.
The only way I know that can be handled today is if the employee, before being hired or at renewal time feels his services are in such demand that he can obtain more favorable contract terms. That works for the top professionals in their fields, but not for an entry-level floor sweeper.
Bratz dolls look like a bunch of cheap whores with half a ton of silicone in their lips. But if someone would like to groom their daughter to a career as a whore, who am I to tell them otherwise. I always wondered how feminists felt about them. After having spend half a century railing against Barbie, Bratz must have seemed liked being taken from the ashes to the fiery flames of hell.
It has a great deal to do with my skillset, since that’s what I do, and doll design is what the guy in question did, regardless whether you think he was “competing” or not or whether “competing” is relevant. I’m not even sure how I could compete without using the same skillset. But basically, I believe that my skillset is my toolbox, it belongs to me and I have to right to use it as I choose. My employer doesn’t buy me or my skills. They lease them under defined and mutually agreeable parameters (whether those are “office hours are 9-5” or “you have these specific projects to complete and maintain” or whatever).
I never have, as my freelance work focuses on smaller companies and not mid- to large-sized ones. I don’t solicit their clients, either. For all intents and purposes I already work for them through my employer, and I also don’t have the resources to handle the really big projects that my employers did. If the client approached me for a project unrelated to what my company was doing for them, however, and there was no signed piece of paper saying I shouldn’t, I see no issue with going ahead.
Free market, right? As far as I’m concerned this is especially the case when the company doesn’t want my clients or my idea.
I thought the whole idea behind a free market was that those who can’t compete either improve their product or get out, not that they monopolize the market by suing the pants off everyone.
As I said above, I don’t know which scenario in this particular case is accurate. If this design was a work project, then absolutely Mattel has a right to it, even if they shelve it. However, Mattel doesn’t own every passing thought that goes through their employees heads, and it’s pretty Big Brother scary to suggest that they ought to. If he came up with the Bratz design on his own, and on his own time, it’s his.
Really, your scenario also begs the question of when an idea becomes the property of the employer. The instant the idea for the dolls popped into this guy’s head, it existed and was a competing idea. Writing it down, or not, doesn’t change that. You suggest he should quit (immediately? is there a timeframe here where it’s still his and doesn’t yet belong to someone else? and what is it and how do you make it not completely arbitrary?) and try to sell the idea on his own, but he had the idea before quitting, so doesn’t the company already own it? They own everything he comes up with while employed there, right? So it’s already too late for him. He can’t have a stray thought in the shower without it belonging to his employer.
I hope you can see why I find that invasive and over-stepping any kind of reasonable boundaries.
My designs are designed and coded from scratch and are original for every client to the extent that they can be. However, let’s be realistic – all art, all ideas, are derivative of something else. The really good ideas create something original and unique, but everything starts from the ideas we’re already familiar with.
The logo on a website is always going to go at the top of the page. The navigation bar can be either horizontally across the top, or vertically down the left, but it’ll never be at the bottom. The main content is going to be underneath the logo and top banner. Does this mean I’ve “stolen” the design from elsewhere? If I have, so has everyone else.
I don’t personally find the body mold of Bratz to be very similar to Barbie at all. They are far more cartoony. If Bratz dolls had giant torpedo boobs and a small head and pointed toes, you’d have a point. Instead they have relatively normal-looking boobs (at least in comparison to Barbie), large heads and flat feet. The torso and legs are shaped differently too.
Sorry, I still disagree. My employer is not my master, and they have no jurisdiction over what I do in my free time, or how I choose to pursue or not pursue other business opportunities. I don’t tell them when I’m interviewing for other jobs, either. And I see no need to give up my current income before I’ve determined if my small business startup is viable, or my idea saleable. My idea, my life, my right to choose.
Yeah, I agree with this pretty much completely. If he signed a piece of paper claiming all rights, the poor guy is SOL. It is extremely ethically questionable, however, since as has already been pointed out, the little guy doesn’t really have the choice to walk away from such a contract if he’s unhappy with it. Most people still need to work for a living, and a lot of industries will make sure you don’t unless you sign on the dotted line. An employee has virtually no leverage against an entity with billions of dollars and an army of lawyers. I do feel (obviously) that such contracts should be illegal unless there’s a real, viable option to refuse to sign it. No one should have that kind of absolute control over me, and having the money to bend the world to your will on that point doesn’t make it okay.
I have thankfully never worked for a company (other than temp firms) that thought to make me sign anything. Though I worked for one guy who mentioned signing a non-compete agreement upon hiring, but he never gave it to me and I had no personal incentive to remind him. His concern, his responsibility.
(Just for the record, I don’t have a dog in this fight. I think they’re ugly dolls but I don’t really care. My concern here is for the intellectual property rights of individual people, and strongly preferring they not get trampled upon by giant corporations, and certainly not made legal or give precedent that they can do so.)
Um…yeah. You cared enough to complain about my not following your ideal of “issues of intellectual ownership and employment,” but not about anyone else doing the same in the thread. Apparently, given your refusal to be consistent and your continued rude and boorish attitude, as confirmed above, this whole thing of yours was just one of your drive-by personal attacks.
No, what matters is the contract. As a photographer, it’s not uncommon to shoot an assignment on a company’s dime, and then sell out takes to agencies, resell the photos to other publications later, etc. It’s all spelled out in the contract. And I’ve had assignments where I was sent someplace, did the main assignment and then freelanced a second assignment while I was out there to another (and you can argue competing, although it was in a different country) publication. I did give the assigning publication first dibs on it, but they didn’t want it. There’s no ethical or moral dilemma there. Also, you don’t own my pictures. You have usage rights to my photos, that’s it. I will never sign a work-for-hire contract as a freelancer. Ever.
So, what I’m saying is that some of the assumptions in this thread about creative professionals is incorrect. What matters is what’s in the contract.
Not necessarily; employment law varies from jurisdiction to jurisdiction, but in most, there are conditions and rights that aren’t valid even if part of a contract. (That’s not unique to employment law, of course.) Several notable cases have gone to court where non-competition arrangements prohibiting employees from going to work for competitors have been deemed unenforceable. In the State of California noncompetition agreements are generally not legally enforceable, except in certain cases, usually where a person sells a business.
However, if I am reading some of the court papers correctly, Mattel’s case here is ironclad beyond employee agreements; they actually demonstrated that they had registered copyrightable elements of Bratz design. (December 3 decision by Judge Larson, pp. 10-11.) If that’s the case, Carter Bryant’s employee agreement is quite beside the point; unless it were to actually, specifically say Bryant’s rights somehow trump copyright law, the designs actually were registered by Mattel, making this a very straightforward case.
Had Bryant designed the dolls on Mattel time and then taken them out of Mattel without Mattel’s knowledge of their existence this’d be a sticky case, but that doesn’t appear to be what happened; it appears this was actually done as Mattel work, to the extent that Mattel proved with relative ease that the work had been done for them, and THEN was taken out of the company by Bryant and used to start a rival toy line.
It’s worth noting that MGA raised the white flag on the issue of whether Mattel owned the original Bratz design, and argued that subsequent variations didn’t violate Mattel copyrights they evidently had no argument against.
The decision refers, again and again, to copyright, not the employment agreement with Bryant.
In the specific case of Bratz and Carter Bryant, the evidence suggests that he’s just a thief (well, I don’t know him; he might just be too dumb to know what he was doing was wrong.) In general, however, I agree with you, and I think employment law needs to be careful about its willingness to enforce contracts that go beyond the protection of an employer’s valid concerns over intellectual property.
They look cleaner and neater than the prostitutes that I see in mugshots, or walking the street near the airport, and not as nice as the prostitutes I see in high price scandals like the one with Spitzer. Just what kind of prostitutes do they look like?
To me they look more like the celebrities that intrude on the news who are rich and famous but don’t have any actual talent or work or apparently underpants. Or they look like teenagers emulating the stylings of these rich idiots or other young actresses or musicians.
Good for you. But some people lease all their creativity in a particular field to their employer for a particular unbroken period. That may well be what happened in this case. In which case, all the employee’s creativity was sold to their employer for that period, and they (and you) have no gripe.
The key reason that employers want contractual terms that entitle them to all an employee’s creativity for an unbroken period is that they are dealing with intangible output. If you were paid to come up with valuable ideas between 9-5, how the hell could your employer ever prove when you had the idea? Any half smart and dishonest employee is always going to say they came up with the idea on the weekend, and how could that be disproved?
If you want to get paid you have to expect to give some legally enforceable value.
Absent a written and signed agreement that says so, it can’t and shouldn’t be assumed that all of an employee’s ideas are work-for-hire belonging to the primary employer. That again gets into scenarios where Big Company claims to own the marketing materials of Small Company because one of their designers did a quickie freelance project on a weekend. That’s a logically and ethically ridiculous claim.
If an employee signs such an agreement, then in my opinion he’s foolish, or else it’s as discussed before and he really didn’t have a viable alternative. Which again, if his choice is basically “sign over your life and soul or starve,” I think that should be an illegal, unenforceable contract.
To be clear, I’m not talking about making these determinations based on a timeclock. I don’t know how it works where you work, but every place I’ve worked, the ideas of mine that are work-for-hire and ought to and do belong to the company are directly related to the specific projects to which I’ve been assigned. They are the things that fall within the scope of my job description and assigned duties. Ideas that do not relate to said assigned projects, even if they potentially compete, are mine. If I work at a design house, the ideas I come up with for said design house’s clients, for the marketing materials assigned to me to design, belong to my employer firstly, and ultimately to the client. If I design a website for an entirely different company, who is not a client of the design house, that design belongs to me, and to the extent that I’m willing to allow, to my client.
If I design my own website advertising my own design services, even though said services compete with the design house (on some level, anyway – I was never really going after the same clients), that website is still mine, and does not belong to my primary employer.
I do, and I do. I just expect to have legally enforceable appropriate boundaries between what I do on my personal time and what I do on my employer’s time in exchange for my paycheck.
Thanks for explaining the details of this specific case. (I don’t speak legalese, so my eyes tend to glaze over… )
Naturally since it’s apparent that he took work-for-hire and sold it to someone else, he’s in the wrong here (which I did say in my first post).
But that was the main thrust of my argument. No company should own every idea I have and every passing thought that flits across my brain. When doing work-for-hire I’ve agreed to provide them with ideas pertaining to the specific tasks they assign me, and I do so on company time (and I’m fairly strict with making a clear divide between “work time” and “personal time” for just that reason – it’s exceedingly rare that I take work home with me, although I’ll stay late on occasion if needed). I do this in exchange for my paycheck, but their money doesn’t grant them the right to put their fingers in every pie they can conceivably get their hands on. I keep my personal projects out of their office, so they can keep their office out of my personal projects, too.
The real issue here is use of the intellectual property belonging to your employer - which includes your work done for them. That’s why I made the distinction of reusing the code. Doing a website from scratch for a company not targeted by your employer is probably fine, unless an employment contract says no. Lots of companies have rules about this - mine does. Client lists are usually considered proprietary information. If you used information gained from your employment to solicit your company’s clients for outside work, they’d likely have a case against you.
The test in my company is - are you competing against your employer? If you are, I am at a loss why they shouldn’t can you ASAP. That’s why I said your skills don’t matter - I agree that they don’t own them.
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