Wes Zuber napisal(a): > > And what is wrong with clarifying everything in an agreement. If the > agreement is that the company is purchasing some IP and then the seller of > the IP decides to somehow improve it or work on it just common sense would > point towards that effort going to the purchaser unless otherwise agreed.
But this is not the case. In my opinion, what you wrote above refers to the case when the employer is claiming IP to the software on which an employee works *as a part of his/her job*. By hiring the employee to work on that particular software, the employer "purchases" the IP. This is perfectly normal. In Darren's case, the IP claim is not restricted to software they already "purchased". His employer claims IP to ANY software he creates ANYWHERE and ANYTIME, be it or not connected to his work. As Darren wrote, even if he patches a BSD kernel on his home computer for his private needs, if he wanted to release the patch, Oracle would claim IP to it, despite they never previously did any BSD development and didn't order anybody, and especially Darren, to do any work on BSD - so they didn't "purchase" any IP to this software. This is abnormal. > With your argument it would be hard to see how IP would be worth anything > to a company or an individual if the seller could simply recreate it again > and sell it to a competitor. Because actually it isn't. It's only a myth that IP is "worth" anything. What is worth, is what makes difference to the customer - and that is quality and usability of the software. This doesn't depend directly on IP and often has nothing to do with it. Companies spend lots of money and effort on "guarding" IP against the competitors (absurd patent wars being the most prominent example of this), while they would better use that money if they spent them on eg. improving quality assurance so the software has less bugs. What would a customer choose: software that runs stable and doesn't crash every two hours without a reason, or software released by a company that possesses the mystical voodoo IP in form of 5000 patents? Being better than your competitor - having better quality and more - feature-rich software is a fair competition. Trying to stop your competitor from gaining knowledge, to artificially weaken his position without the need for you to really improve, is an unfair competition. It's like an athlete who - instead of concentrating on his own training, to run faster than his opponents - thinks of ways to make his opponents somehow run slower... I don't respect businesses that operate this way. Regards, Jaroslaw Rafa [email protected] -- Zapraszam na moja strone: http://www.ap.krakow.pl/~raj/
