61–70 of 399 posts
Does society accept this behaviour outside tech? Imagine that a Michelin restaurant would claim copyright on the dishes cooked by the chef in his spare time. Or that the big farm would ask for a piece of those carrots grown in the back yard.
In Germany this isn't even a thing.
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There are a lot of things different in the "real" world and the "software" world. Nobody would accept underwear with a build in camera, gps tracker and a microphone wo give the data to x companys. But with a cellphone (almost) everybody is ok. Also if something goes wrong with software, it's the customers problem. The customer accepted the contract with no rights for him (software AS IS, no warranty), nobody would ac…
> The customer accepted the contract with no rights for him (software AS IS, no warranty) That's only specific to FOSS.
There are some cases of of selling products without much in the way of guarantees. Something you buy on eBay AS IS is pretty much only warrantied to be as described.
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Intellectual Property and Copyright aren't quite the same thing. The IP is the idea, whereas the copyright is the specific recipe. So in my mind, the equivalent would be using your learned cooking skills for another restaurant while working at a Michelin restaurant. They both serve food (competing or related industry), but while the dishes are different, the techniques to create them come from the same source. I woul…
Intellectual Property isn't really a thing in itself. It's a vague collection of a couple of different concepts, including Copyright, Patents and Trademarks. Those are three very different kinds of temporary monopolies granted by the government, but the people who promote the phrase "intellectual property" want them to be considered as not a government-granted monopoly on a certain kind of business, but as a natural…
Are we really at the point where we're using 100 tweets to write what should be in a blog post?
Then again, Jimmy Johns was always pretty bad for the workers and attempted to have kids working there signing non-competes.
Maybe we should be happy it took google so long.
edit: 2 more paragraphs
Does society accept this behaviour outside tech? Imagine that a Michelin restaurant would claim copyright on the dishes cooked by the chef in his spare time. Or that the big farm would ask for a piece of those carrots grown in the back yard.
This is mostly a US thing. If I don't implement a DIRECT competitor to my company in my free time, the company can do absolutely nothing about it here. IF I implement a competitor and put it on the market, they can fire me. They can't however, sue me for the posession of the software. That's just a legal nightmare in the US.
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It's crazy that the "using X company equipment" legal basis works at all in those disputes. Most of the time, "equipment" seems to mean "laptop". IHMO when "equipment" is such a commodity as a laptop, this should never even be an issue. That's like a newspaper that would claims the work of one of it's journalist who is writing books on his personal time on the basis that the book was written with a pencil he brought…
This is most easily resolved by simply not using a company laptop at any time. One of the first pieces of advice I got when I joined a big tech company for the first time was to just put the work provided laptop back in it's original box and get my own. This turns out to be pretty good from a number of angles-- you get an emergency spare plus any kind of crazy bloat ware your job needs you already have a sacrificial…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is most easily resolved by simply not using a company laptop at any time. One of the first pieces of advice I got when I joined a big tech company for the first time was to just put the work provided laptop back in it's original box and get my own. This turns out to be pretty good from a number of angles-- you get an emergency spare plus any kind of crazy bloat ware your job needs you already have a sacrificial…
And then you get fired for spreading sensitive company information on non-authorized devices.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
In Germany this isn't even a thing.
Have you tried it? One still has “Anzeigepflicht des Arbeitnehmers” (duty to report). And then your boss has a right to forbid your activity. It is a very thing in Germany.
But 'duty to report' is not the same as 'everything you do is ours'.
The duty to report sounds more like "you are not allowed to have another job next to this one unless you get approval". Which in some cases is logical: an employer wants you to be on your A-game, but if you work 2 other jobs you might be tired all day and not deliver any good work.