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Its not. Thats why it doesnt relate to IT law at
all.
On the otherhand, we're dealing with information.
Have you got any of your email from former jobs? Was it company related? That'd
be data theft. The fact it was personally addressed to you is very difficult to
distinguish in law.
In the US individuals have been prosecuted for
taking data from the server, to their workstation, to work on their assigned
task (successfully). One of the speakers at sage a while back was a convicted
triple felon due to microsoft's lawyers going to work on him when he left under
less then positive circumstances.
The three felonies he went to jail for all involved
doing his job in line with company guidelines and with the cooperation of
systems administrators who granted him access and approved his methods.
Microsoft simply chose not to pursue charges with them.
How do you define that while employed you can act
as an employee performing technical duties that involve being in possession of
intangible information, without making sending the developer to jail over half
the payment disputes that arrise, but prevents your employee from screwing you
WHILE employed.
The answer is generally restraint of trade,
and confidentiallity clauses in employment contracts, IE when you
quit, you shall not work for my competitor for <X> months and you shall
not under any circumstances reveal information you obtain during the course of
your duties to anybody,ever, except as required by relevant
law's.
Then the guy would have been screwed, he would have
been twice in breach of contract, and depending on the nature of the
contract/etc - screwed financially, or by a large black man named Bubba in a
very uncomfortable place (Not the back of a volkswagon either).
The fact that the IT industry is run like a
collection of hedge wizards bartering for arcane rites and services doesnt
justify making life impossible for those of us who do treat our jobs as jobs, or
expect to deal with businesses instead of slightly progressed
propellorheads who are still trying to work out what commercial liability
means.
----- Original Message -----
Sent: Tuesday, March 04, 2003 12:05
PM
Subject: [cfaussie] RE: OT: A lesson
learned
Maybe I just see it as being a little more black and white than that.
The guy in the article stole files and used them for his benefit. These
were not back-up files or reference files used during the development of the
project. The files were released to a 3rd party.
How
is this different from an employee working in a retail store stealing
furniture and passing them over to another person. Lines of code should come
under the same laws as a piece of furniture.
IT
laws need to be addressed. I have some applications I have spent a lot of time
developing and working on, it would crush me if an employee took them and used
them for their own benefit, I consider this stealing, the law sees this as
being ok since they work for me at the time.
Blake
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Blake Foss
Web Foot Forward
p: 61 2 9340 4401
f: 61 2 8080 8190
m: 0410 747 620
Why is that scary?
Its not a violation of IT law, its should be a
violation of contract law or employment law. You can't sue an employee for
fucking up, wilfully or otherwise. He was STILL an employee with
authorization at the time of the incident.
Miller said that the employee had given formal notice of his intention
to resign from the company but still had �about 10� days to go. The
relationship had been amicable, with the company having no reason to suspect
a breach was likely to be committed.
If he could be prosecuted for data theft, so
could and DBA who took a backup copy onto his development laptop to workon,
or anybody who accesssed the work DB. US types HAVE been prosecuted for
accessing the database that its there job to maintain, treating the
transferance of data between their workstation and the server as data
theft.
I'd suggest that our laws are significantly
better. Next time I have an argument with a client over payment, I don't
want to be faced with the counter charge of having 'stolen' their data when
I downloaded a copy of their access database to work on with their full
consent.
----- Original Message -----
Sent: Tuesday, March 04, 2003 11:27
AM
Subject: [cfaussie] RE: OT: A lesson
learned
This was an old posting, but I remembered it as seeming like
something really stupid in IT laws and shows how under funded and lazy the
Police are relating to electronic crime.
Check out this article:
Very scary and as they say in TV land, "Trust
No-One".
Blake
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Blake Foss
Web Foot Forward
p: 61 2 9340 4401
f: 61 2 8080 8190
m: 0410 747 620
Over the weekend a former employee of ours
got into our servers, copied files and made some small modifications,
nothing major just nuisance stuff - but enough to piss me
off.
Today after gathering all the log file data
i decided to ring the police.
What the Computer Crimes Section told me
was a bit of an eye opener;
Former staff members are allowed back
inside your servers and are able to copy and modify information at will
- because they were once allowed to.
The only way they can be charged criminally
is if they gain access to your system via another means other than a
known username and password (it doesnt even matter if it wasnt their
username and password - any will do).
The only way other than changing every
password on your system is to have a watertight employment
contract, advising them that they have no access rights to your system
after their period of employment ends, this contract must also outline
the ownership of the intellectual property they create whilst
employed - this must be signed by both parties. If they gain
access to the system outside of their employment then its a
criminal act.
We didnt have this in place, and our
contract was full of wholes when dealing with the ownership of the code
he created for us.
We can of course go after him via civil
action - but he hasnt got anything, so it would be a waste of time - i
would have much preffered a criminal conviction.
A bitter lesson learned
Does anyone have a contract of this nature
that they would like to share?
Steve
Soars
www.i-redlands.net
Interactive Redlands
Shop 2 Cleveland Town
Square
Cnr Queen & Bloomfield Sts
Cleveland QLD
4163
[p] 07 3821-5800
[f] 07
3821-5811
"what we do in
life
echoes an eternity"
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