No, I have not written a screenplay at work. This is not a request for actual legal advice.
Say I have a lot of free time at my job. Say I do creative work for my employer. And say that I signed one of those work-for-hire contracts that gives my employer ownership of anything I create for them.
This hypothetical job includes a lot of downtime, so I write a screenplay. I shop it around, and it gets purchased by HotFilms Studio for $1,000,000.
Assume I wrote the screenplay exclusively while I was on the clock, using my employer’s computer. Can my employer claim part or all of that money? More importantly, do I owe it to them?
It’s quite likely that your contract would include language to the effect of “If you are working on something that relates to your work here, or uses company resources, we own it.” Mine does. If your job involves the film industry or professional writing in any way, they’d have an interest. And if you wrote it on the company computer on the clock, it’s theirs.
That’s the kind of contract I was thinking of. So assuming I edit health care brochures, my screenplay is owned by my company. If I were foolish enough to confess where I wrote it.
(What if I write half of it at home and half at work? Does that change stuff?)
Watch out if you wrote it, or did any editing of it on a work computer. Even after you delete it, traces can be left on the work computer. And word processing programs like MS Word can leave traces in the file itself of which computers ever did any any editing on the file.
If they want it bad enough, no.
Basically your only safe bet would be disassembling the drive and grinding the platters with an appropriate power tool.
Not something I want to do to my work PC.
I could reccomend some tricks that WOULD suffice to have my desktop hard disk drive wiped then recycled (as in, not within the company), but that would cross the line into AntiDopery.
This is not hypothetical in IT. People have been sued, I believe successfully, over this happening (though with computer programs rather than screen plays). If you use company time and company computers the IP belongs to the company.
I don’t know about screenplays, but for what I do, anything that is patentable and remotely related to your work is owned by the company, even if you invent it at home. Writing a screenplay on a work computer might be worse, depending on the rules of the company. My writing for myself is done totally at home - papers and columns are done at work and home, though I don’t make any money on them.
The person in this situation would be well advised to get clearance for the screenplay before shopping it around. It would probably be a lot easier to get before it gets sold. Unless company rules say it is okay to do private work on company machines, it might be best to bring ones laptop (though goofing off becomes more obvious.)
Whoops.
To clarify - I was not talking about traces elsewhere on the computer, just the ‘traces in the file itself of which computers ever did any any editing on the file.’ I didn’t think that RTF format had any provision for editing tracking.
Well, if your employment agreement says it’s theirs, then it’s theirs. If not, it’s yours.
But note what you said:
If you’re creating something *for them * – on assignment as part of your job – it’s theirs. Unless the contract claims “anything you create on their equipment,” it doesn’t apply.
In order for the owner to claim copyright, they would have to claim that the screenplay is a work made for hire. According to the copyright law:
Since this was not within the scope of your employment and you were not commissioned to do this, the employer has no claim to the copyright. You can do with it what you want and they have no legal basis to claim ownership (other than a employment agreement that spells out you are granting them the right to everything – which you’d be foolish to sign). You have no obligation to pay them a cent.
They can still fire you for writing it on company time, but the movie money should tide you over.
I suspect you’re right, although I’ve never seen the file format analyzed in any substantial way.
Word is a really bad choice for your idea.
I suppose exporting to .TXT would probably be the cleanest bet. Or, HTML would let you keep formatting but be able to analyze the output tag by tag.
INAL but is this true ? You were using their computers and they were paying for your time, so I would think they have reasonable claim to the final product. Admittedly I can’t see something like this happening if your job is totally unrelated to the screenplay your righting, but if you work as say a writer for a sit-com, and produce a comedy script while at work, and on work computers I would assume your company would have pretty good claim to it.
In the area of IT I work in every contract has this clause in… :smack:
INAL but is this true ? You were using their computers and they were paying for your time, so I would think they have reasonable claim to the final product. Admittedly I can’t see something like this happening if your job is totally unrelated to the screenplay your writing, but if you work as say a writer for a sit-com, and produce a comedy script while at work, and on work computers I would assume your company would have pretty good claim to it.
In the area of IT I work in every contract has this clause in… :smack:
Thanks for the answers. This has been interesting.
I slipped up by adding the “for them” to my OP – I didn’t really mean that, and I think my head was using it as a shortcut for “on their equipment.” The situation I was envisioning was something like an office assistant or receptionist who’s got enough time to write something completely unrelated to their actual job, not a sitcom writer producing a feature screenplay.
I assume that the same claim to copyright would apply if I wrote a novel on company legal pads using company pens on company time, right? It might be harder for them to prove, of course…
It really depends on the agreement you signed when you hired on. With a lot of companies, anything you do while you work for them is their property unless they say otherwise.
I just wanted to add here that I wrote almost my entire second novel at my job. The office manager knew I was writing it; the deal was that I would pull off of it to do anything else; and some months after I wrote it, when my hard drive had crashed and my publisher lost 20 pages from the middle of the novel and I couldn’t find my backup disk, the IT people at my office spent about 4 hours recovering those 20 pages from the tape backup.
(This was a law firm and the partner I worked for wanted me to be there all day, even though he never actually had anything for me to do before about 3:30 and then it always had to be done that day.)
There are situations where the employer might want to asset a claim. In this case, yes, they were paying for my time, but they were only paying for my work product as it related to their business. Maybe I should add that this was during a very slow period for that firm, and secretaries were sitting around reading big fat Diana Gabaldon novels, also on company time. I looked much busier.
If you stole a dollar from your employer and used the dollar to buy a lottery ticket and won $20,000,000.00 would the employer be entitled to the $20,000,000.00 from you? Quite possibly. The employer could seek to impose a “constructive trust” on your winnings.
Fundamentally, if you use your employer’s time and equipment to write a screen play (without permission) you are a thief and you run the risk of being treated as such.
Yes, as a practical matter, most employers and judges would understand that employees do their own stuff from time to time and would likely let it go. But still.
Not according to copyright law. It clearly spells out what is meant by “work made for hire”; the employer has no right to claim copyright on anything you write that is not part of your assigned duties. Without copyright, they cannot legally get a cut of the sale of the screenplay.
In fact, even if they had a clause saying any work you do during working hours belongs to them, a good lawyer could tear that to shreds. Unless the work was *part of your duties * it is not work made for hire and the company has no claim. The clause requiring it would be illegal and thus null and void. Courts have traditionally taken a very dim view of a company claiming something was work made for hire when it was not part of your work duties.
So the employer has no legal claim to the manuscript or any money made from selling it. The definition of “work made for hire” was specifically worded to prevent this sort of claim by the employer: the writer is the sole owner of any work created unless it is created as part of his job duties. If you were hired specifically to write a screenplay, then it would be work made for hire, but unless that’s part of your job duties, the employer has no copyright claim.
Now, they can claim, as above, that you owe them for doing it on your time, but that’s a different issue and it’s hard to say how a court might rule (it’s also unlikely to be cost-effective for the company). They also have the right to fire you for doing this.
But the work is not and cannot be owned by the company unless they told you to write it. In answer to the last two questions of the OP, the employer cannot claim any of the money you are paid for the manuscript (though they can choose to sue you for the lost time), and you do not owe them a cent (unless sued).
Again, no they wouldn’t. If they hire you to write the sit-com script, then they own it (work made for hire). If you also write a screenplay on their time, you own it (not WMFH).
They have no basis fo the claim to the screenplay because you are the author, and did not write it as part of your assigned duties. The fact that they supply the equipment gives them no claim on the result.
They would have grounds for firing you, and maybe, if they’re lucky in court, they can claim some of your salary, but they do not have any claim on the manuscript.
So if I rob a bank of 1 million dollars, and use the money to commission a work of art, the bank can’t get the rights from me because of “copyright law”? GMAB.
