Intellectual Property

[lappir]

Anyone have information on "Intellectual Property"? 

I've heard about companies saying an idea from an employee was company property because it occurred while at work. No personal contacts with anyone who has had it happen to them. Plan on making a call to the family lawyer someday soon, but have always learned much from the Escapees group and appreciate it. I do understand you get what you pay for though. 

Feel free to PM if you would like to keep the conversation private, but maybe others have thought of this too. 

 

Rod

[Kirk W]

You bring up an interesting question and make me wonder what type of property you are dealing with. I have read on the subject, but not recently. For me it came up over an issue of plagiarism of material from my website, about 15 years ago by a fellow RVer who was building a site to be used for generation of income. (His site did become very active and successful) Investigation showed that much of his early content was stolen from others with RV websites and had minimal changes other than his claim of authorship. In my case, it would have been difficult and expensive to do anything, partly because I foolishly made no effort to copyright my material before publishing it. I actually contacted the owners of 2 other sites material was lifted from but none of us took legal actions.

Legal Zoom has one of the better explanations that I find just now.

What Is Intellectual Property?

[Barbaraok]

As far as an employer having rights to any work produced while working for them, you would need to look at your employment contract.   It would be spelled out (in small print) somewhere in that contract, or by reference to some general publication of the company that no one reads, as to how intellectual property rights for things developed during your tenure at the company are to be treated.  

For something like a written story, etc., Copyright is yours the minute you publish it, whether you formally Copywrite it or not - but a lot easier to protect if you go through the steps to Copywrite it, which you can now do online.   

[Dutch_12078]

My employment contracts specified that work product related copyrights and patents produced as part of my assigned projects or otherwise using company resources belonged to the company.