Forwarded message:
Date: Sun, 19 Oct 1997 10:58:11 -0600 From: TruthMonger <tm@dev.null> Subject: GAT & GAB
Anyone notice the court ruling in regard to the company that sued to retrieve information that was inside an employee's head, claiming that his employment agreement made *all* of his ideas the property of the company. Anyone notice that the Thought Judge ruled that the Thought Laws required the individual to divulge said ideas, or be imprisoned by the Thought Police?
IBM has such a non-disclosure agreement that apparently signs over to them any and all work I may do while employeed by them. Fortunately I had other pre-existing agreements and when I signed the paper as a function of employment I added a proviso that I had a consultancy as well as pre-existing non-disclosures that limited their rights to my work to only that performed while on-the-clock. Two years later they have never contacted me regarding this so I assume they accepted it. I know of another engineer here who said that such proviso's didn't apply to him because he was under pre-existing contracts with the government (in various ways) that prevented that sort of contract with him. They didn't refuse him employment either... Contracts are contracts, if you don't like a part of it then mark it out and put your own proviso's in their. If they accept it, by paying you wages for work, then you are pretty much done with such broad intellectual property issues. That's the nice thing about contracts, as a signatory you have a right to review and modify the contract. Use that right. ____________________________________________________________________ | | | The financial policy of the welfare state requires that there | | be no way for the owners of wealth to protect themselves. | | | | -Alan Greenspan- | | | | _____ The Armadillo Group | | ,::////;::-. Austin, Tx. USA | | /:'///// ``::>/|/ http://www.ssz.com/ | | .', |||| `/( e\ | | -====~~mm-'`-```-mm --'- Jim Choate | | ravage@ssz.com | | 512-451-7087 | |____________________________________________________________________|