But I’m not talking about work you’re doing for your job. If you’re assigned to make turtle widgets by your boss then the company gets to control the turtle widgets. You don’t. You also can’t go to Tortoise Inc. and sell ideas you’ve had about turtle widgets. They’re not yours and I get that.
I don’t have a problem with trade secrets or the company’s intel protection.
The problem with this is that it is impossible to value this sort of idea. In the environment of a single person creating a single thing, perhaps, but that is not how most innovation is done. consider a new microprocessor. The design team might consist of hundreds of people. The design will involve thousands of inventions, some big and some small. How much value does each give to the final product? How many would be worthless except when combined with someone else’s idea? Companies like this don’t give partial ownership not because they are evil but because the idea is unworkable in general.
When you are working on a similar project on your own, how do you keep the proprietary information you learned from work out of it? If you are doing something completely different, like write a novel, there is no issue.
I don’t really see that as a problem. In the example you’ve provided, whole teams of people are working to solve a problem or create a new piece of technology. There’s no issue about sharing ownership between employees and the company here. This type of development simply won’t occur without it being an assigned task within the company.
Put another way: your (or your team’s) creation came about because it was part of your job. Your compensation for that development is your salary. Not satisfied with that? Tough.
Then I guess we’ll have to agree to disagree on this issue. I believe that creating ideas can be treated like just another job if the two parties involved agree to the terms. I may hire an artist to paint a portrait or a housepainter to paint a bedroom, but both are people who agreed to do a job for me with the understanding I would own the final product.
And again, there’s no disagreement from me. You hire someone to do job X. They do job X. They get paid. Bam. That’s their compensation. End of story. We agree.
What if instead you’re a wall painter working for Wall Painter Inc. 9-5 M-F you paint walls. On the weekend, you create murals and sell those to local art galleries. Does Wall Painter Inc. own the rights to your murals? What if, in order to work for Wall Painter Inc. you had to sign a contract stating that any time you picked up a paint brush, Wall Painter Inc. owned the resulting product?
Let’s ignore the legal aspect here. Would you consider such a clause fair? Ethical?
Would a clause such as this one ultimately lead to a lot less murals being created?
As I’ve said, there’s a good argument to be made here in general terms. But in this specific case, this isn’t the issue. Bryant was specifically hired to create doll designs for Mattel and that’s the product he sold to another company. The analogy would be that the company paid you for a year to program a Turtle Widget and then you decided you could get a better price by selling the program to Microsoft. Your company, which hired you in good faith to do a job for them, is now out the money they paid you and the year they’ve lost.
I also agree with you here. Sometimes a creator might be forced to sign an unfair contract because its industry standards. That isn’t right. But again, it’s not the situation here. Toy companies do buy ideas from free-lancers. Bryant obviously was able to walk into the front door of a toy company and find a buyer for his doll design. He could have taken the honest route and developed his Bratz idea on his own and then offered it to Mattel and MGA and anyone else.
I have nothing but respect for your position here. You’ve decided to accept the risk of being a freelancer and you deserve the rewards. If you have a bad year and don’t create a saleable product, you won’t sell anything. If you have a good year and create a very valuable product, you can sell if on the open market to the highest bidder.
But if you were to agree to work-for-hire then you should abide by the agreement you made. The company pays you for good or bad years in exhcnage for them benefiting from the risk they’re taken off your shoulders.
The point is, that if you hire a painter to paint your portrait, you own that portrait, and that portrait only. You don’t also own the portrait he painted of your neighbor or the landscape he painted last month or the still life he’ll paint two weeks from now. If you tried to claim that you did, you’d encounter a hell of a lot of resistance.
This.
Also please note that I’ve already said that it doesn’t appear that the Bratz case is a good example of what I’m talking about, per RickJay’s explanation. Me no speak legalese and all that. If Mattel had registered copyright, which MGA apparently didn’t even dispute, then clearly the design was work-for-hire, had been a project assigned to the guy by the company, and without question belonged to them as a result. I’m not talking about that kind of thing; I’m talking about the guy who develops an idea on his own time, on his own dime, and without it having been assigned to him by his employer. I don’t believe you can legitimately argue that such a thing is work-for-hire, even if the idea is within the same industry, even if it competes.
Creating derivative works is already regulated by copyright law – I believe that you have to ask for and get written permission from the copyright holder to do so. I have no problem with that, either, so if the Tortoise Widget is based on the code for the Turtle Widget, this guy needs to negotiate with the copyright holder of the Turtle Widget in order to sell it. Whether the company/copyright holder gives him permission or not is up to them.
Actually all this is far less complicated as a freelancer than as a W-2 employee. If I’m freelancing for someone, I get to make my own contract. I specifically state that I own the copyright, and I only grant them license to use the material, or to buy the copyright from me, on my own terms. If the client doesn’t agree to this, I don’t work with them.
The confusion comes when you’re working W-2 for someone and freelancing on the side at the same time. Some companies want “work-for-hire” to include way more than they have a legitimate right to, IMO, which ends up making the whole mess way too complicated and unfair. That’s why I said in the beginning that there has to be a boundary between what I do for them, for which I get a salary, and what I do for me, for which I might have the opportunity to sell it to someone else and make money that way.
If the company keeping me as a W-2 employee gives me a written contract stating that they have a right to everything I do, I may not have a viable alternative to signing it (if I’m broke and it’s the only job offer I have on the horizon, or similar). If they don’t have me sign a contract, they may simply assume that they have the IP rights to everything I do. Either way, they’re screwing me over, and that makes me rather unhappy.
Kaio, is this issue of an employer employing you to do something, but then claiming rights to something distinctly different which you did on the weekend an actual problem, or are you just indulging in recreational indignation at a non-existent problem?
But painting a wall is a concrete piece of work, which is easy to assess as being performed in or out of a particular employment. Writing a website is the same - it consists of deliverables whose ownership can be clearly assigned, and tasks that are easy to identify as having been performed on a particular job. Having an idea consists of neither. If you are being asked to think up new doll concepts, how on earth do you prove you had a particular idea purely out of work hours? How does a company prove you did it in work? It’s impossible, which is why in the specific case of concept generation, exclusive contracts of this sort are signed. It’s the only basis on which this sort of creative work can possibly be salaried. Otherwise companies would be simply paying people a wage and vainly hoping that their employees are honest enough to bring their ideas to them first; no company will do that, so people will stop being given a salary for ideas. If you make this entire class of contract unenforceable, designers would have to conceive and develop concepts on their own before taking them to manufacturers. There’s nothing intrinsically wrong with this, of course - lots of designers do it. But many others clearly want the security and reliability of a salaried position, and sign contracts that enable this.
I can’t understand why you would want to essentially ban people from freely entering into a certain type of contract. Nothing’s forcing them to sign it.
I see ethnic dolls lots of places, American Girl, for starters. Hell, at AG, you can “design” your own (one to look like you, supposedly). 
There was some baby doll (memory has expunged the name and maker, thank god) that was available in white, black, and brown versions as well–you could feed her and I think she wet. It’s been awhile since I had a daughter that young.
I don’t like the whole Bratz meme–the 'tude, the clothes, the emphasis on tude and clothes and make up for pre-pubescent girls. I’ll go along (for the sake of peace) that these dolls may not be prostitutes, but they sure are skanks. I have more respect for the prostitutes–at least they make some money out of their transactions. What do Bratz get but social diseases and reputations? As for feminists, I doubt you’d get two women who claim that term to agree on what Bratz or Barbies mean nowadays. Feminists are one big lump of estrogen, they are as divergent and different as non-feminists.
Sorry, that was my fault for reading late and trying to finish a post and get ready to go to bed at the same time. :smack:
Obviously raping anyone- prostitutes or otherwise- is a heinous crime and one that I don’t condone. Trying to compare raping a prostitute to petty theft is just silly, IMHO.
lee, the fact you’re female changes the argument a bit, I’m afraid. Whenever my mates and our other halves are together having a few drinks and the topic of slutty dress comes up, there’s usually a couple of the women saying “I should be able to dress however I want!”, overlooking the fact that if you dress in a sexual way you are sending a message that you’re available for that sort of thing, or could be persuaded after a few drinks or some sweet-talking. That might not be the correct message, but it is the one the average guy at a party or in a bar or wherever is likely to take.
The other thing I think you’re forgetting is that “prostitute” is a handy shorthand term for “disreputable woman with no standards who will sleep with anyone” with the “and they’ll do it for money, too!” addendum just to make emphasis the heinousness of this. You see, being a “slut” isn’t a bad thing to a lot of people (male or female), but being a prostitute is; hence, saying “Those dolls look like prostitutes!” conveys the speaker’s problem (inappopriately dressed sexualised dolls) far more effectively than “those dolls are dressed like sluts!”.
FWIW I have no problem with legal prostitution (it’s legal in Australia), which is an entirely different kettle of fish to what you’re likely to see in the US (unless you live in parts of Nevada, IIRC).
First off, why would you assume that this is “recreational” to me when I’ve already made it clear that I work in a creative industry where intellectual property is the thing that I sell to make a living?
Secondly, if you’re asking if an employer has ever screwed me over specifically in regards to IP issues, no – but others have had that experience, cf. Jaglavak. If you’re asking if I have, in the broader sense, ever been screwed over by an employer due to them doing and getting away with something based on a legal technicality, which wasn’t even close to ethical (much less fair), and not having any recourse because I can’t afford the big-gun lawyers – yes, I have. I’ve lost substantial sums of money over this kind of crap. I have a vested interest in a system that prevents such things from happening. I would still have a vested interest in such a system even if only people other than me have gotten screwed over, because I can never know when it might be my turn.
I don’t know why you seem to have this bug up your ass about me, but if you don’t want to read my posts, you can choose not to open this thread, and you can certainly choose not to respond to them.
Presumably assigned work projects for doll designs (toy designs, cell phone designs, purse designs…) also require deliverables. Sketches, spec sheets, engineering drawings, whatever is appropriate for that particular product. I would guess that the Bratz design was something he sketched and possibly modeled while he was at the office, and certainly did so because his boss instructed him to. As it was apparently a registered copyright, Mattel would have had some sort of drawing or photo or descriptive text to submit to the copyright office. As far as copyright law goes, my understanding is that the copyright only comes into existence when the idea is put into tangible form. I could have The Best Idea Ever for a website design, but if I never sketch it, write it down, or mock it up, someone else could come up with the idea independently of me and beat me to the punch.
You’d be amazed at the number of Dopers who think that if you hire someone, you literally own them. I think most of them would balk at waterboarding employees (without provocation of course) but everything short of that that employers want to do to employees as OK with them!
Reread the post you are responding to and address the concept of “voluntary” as applied to employment contracts.
You have given no real life examples of someone being employed to do A but being obliged to hand over their weekend work on B. Until such time as you do, you are making shit up just to get angry at it, which is Recreational Outrage. In fact, if I can coin a new term, it goes beyond recreational outrage and is frankly indulging in Fantasy Outrage.
Jaglavak’s post isn’t clear but certainly doesn’t confirm that he is an example of what you are talking about.
It’s nothing personal about you, it’s just that it seems to me that you are giving a misleading impression. You are making it seem like there is some sort of major problem in this area, when in fact I don’t think that there is, because the situation you are outraged about doesn’t actually occur.
“No more Forgotten Realms novels? AAAAAAARGH!”
Martini Enfield, do I have this straight: you think the meaning of my words is changed because your perception of my gender is changed? Are you serious?
No, I just understand why you have a viewpoint (saying that calling women who dress in a provocative manner “prostitutes” is harmful) that I’ve never heard expressed by any of the guys I know.
I have, however, heard vaguely similar things from one or two of my wife’s Ultra-Liberated Feminist Friends, and your username threw me off because I don’t know many women called “Lee” so I assumed you were a guy; hence the strange disconnect in trying to understand why you’d have a POV that (IME) is bizarre for a guy to hold, if that makes sense.
Eh, mostly it’s just disgust that the law can be used to do this. It’s an excuse to shut down competition if it outcompetes you. So…
0. I consider it obnoxious that it’s legal to sign employees to a contract that would preclude them later competing with you.
I pit the law.
But of your choices, “1. You agree that a then-employee of Mattel created Bratz, but disagree that Mattel owns that intellectual property as a result” is closest.