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Board of Education to Teachers and Students: All Your Copyrights Are Belong To Us
02-16-2013, 10:50 PM
Helen pointed me at this: The board of education for Prince George County in Maryland is intending on implementing a policy whereby they will lay claim to any and all copyrights on any creative act by a student or teacher, in school or out.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/local/edu ... print.html]Washington Post article here.
http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/201 ... dents-work]Wired article here.
Or just Google on "maryland school copyright grab" for dozens more articles.
Frankly, it's not going to work -- the basics of copyright law are designed to prevent someone from swooping in and stealing a copyright like this. They may make it part of the employment contract for the teachers, in which their creative efforts for the classroom become "work for hire" like so many writers have done for decades. But they cannot simply claim the children's copyrights -- they have to negotiate with each child's legal guardians and get a signed agreement ceding the copyright. If they try this, they're going to end up in a lot of legal trouble.
-- Bob
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Then the horns kicked in...
...and my shoes began to squeak.
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Copyright law in many countries specifically prohibits that kind of arbitrary behavior. While a teacher developing an app on school time has to give the copyright to the school, if a teacher gets an idea for a new social media site, does the work on their own time at home, and launches a multimillion-dollar student social networking site, the school board does not own that, and cannot help itself to the profits.This proposed policy would make the school board the sole owners of that site, it's IP, and all goodwill generated by it, leaving the inventor with nothing for their efforts.
This wouldn't fly in a legal setting. I imagine whoever drafted that wasn't a lawyer, but instead just threw words down on paper. I also imagine after it went public, someone in Legal had a read-through, and very quietly advised them to take it off the table, which is why the article says it's been removed from the active list of considered amendments.
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A lot of businesses make it a part of the standard employment contract that any copyrightable work you create while in their employ is theirs, period, even if you never work on it during office hours or use the employer's resources for it. Having been a freelancer in the gaming industry, it's one of my standard interview questions.
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ECSNorway Wrote:A lot of businesses make it a part of the standard employment contract that any copyrightable work you create while in their employ is theirs, period, even if you never work on it during office hours or use the employer's resources for it. Having been a freelancer in the gaming industry, it's one of my standard interview questions. Mostly because of the situation of not knowing WHEN something is actually conceived. Plus, if it's a creative field, it neatly kills the whole "moonlighting freelancer" idea. You have to ask for deliberate exceptions to this "boilerplate" in the contract, or at least that's the realistic expectation. I haven't encountered this sort of boilerplate yet as a graphic designer, but I expect that will change when I can move out of production areas of the industry into actual design firms.
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All you do and create is now ours
02-18-2013, 01:29 AM
I once applied for a job at the subdivision of a large electronics company's responsible for building the cabinets and cases for their various electronic products. They gave me a fifteen page contract to read and then sign in forty plus places indicating that I had read and understood each part of the agreement.
I don't remember the agreement signature numbers or the exact legalize, but I do know they were buried deep possibly it was in the high thirties for the signature number. These set of agreements as stated I initially interpreted to mean that I as an Engineer "agreed" to sign over all rights to anything and everything I developed while working for them or that I developed AFTER working for their company that was related in any way to electronic cabinets or cases. This specifically included any enhancements or improvements to the design, production and/or distribution of said products. Another part specifically stated what I thought was an agreement that forbid me from working for any competitor electronic case company for the next 50 years.
Their company's trade secrets, patents and copyrights was something I'd be willing to agree to protect and I could even see not working for a competitor for 3 to 5 years, but the idea that after working for them I would be forbidden for the rest of my life from working for any other company that made electronic cases was completely outlandish and worse yet was the statement that I was to sign over, for the next 50 years the rights to any work, improvements or patents I developed that was related to electronic cases in any way.
Just to make sure I understood what I was reading I asked the recruiter about those sets of contract agreements and he sent me to the legal department where someone quickly explained again what the marked sections said and it was WORSE than I thought.
The agreement wasn't just for the case/cabinet subdivision of the company it was the entire company.
Given the scope of the main company's products at the time I would have been signing away my right to actually use my EE degree for the rest of my life and most of the rights to my minor in ME even a significant part of my Major in programming.
Don't get me wrong they were all very nice both the recruiter and legal departments, but the legal department said that they felt since they were taking a big chance on hiring an engineer just starting out and they needed extra protection because I would be learning a lot from my first engineering job and that knowledge was theirs and they were taking steps to protect that as much as possible.
What was really more telling than the 15 to 20 minute very clear explanation was the statement by the legal interns made at the end just before they sent me back to the recruiters office. "Just sign it and ignore that part, we know it's restrictive, impossible to enforce or follow and besides it won't stand up in any county, state or federal court of law."
Even if the company wasn't trying to take advantage of trainee engineers and it was some type of employee test, that wasn't what was bothering me.
I wasn't worried about the law or even them threatening to take me to court, I was worried about the fact I was being asked to give my word knowing there was no way I would or could keep my word with the contract as it was written.
I was hoping it was a test, but needless to say I refused to sign those sets of agreements and instead blacked them out and put a note in the margins pointing to the blank back of the 15th page where I had carefully wrote out what I would agree to do for the rest of my life as related to that company's procedures, products, trade secrets, patients and copyrights.
I didn't get the job, but I kept an eye on the local electronic cabinet/case subdivision, which lasted 4 years before being out sourced to first Mexico then I think later to China and then I watched the greater company until it was effectively dead roughly ten years after that with a few surviving fully independent subdivisions scattered around the country and a trade name maintained by a set of lawyers on retainer that stick it on various products that they do not in any way make.
I had hoped the impossible contract was some sort of embedded test, but after talking to their legal department and then getting no reply back not even a form letter I have to conclude it wasn't a test, the company was effectively following a policy where they selected for employees that weren't the sort of people that I would want to trust with trade secrets.
Later I talked to several other trainee engineers that I knew had applied to the company and was shocked at the number who had or went ahead and signed the contract as it was written, when I asked how they could do that they had shrugged and said "That it had to be illegal and the company couldn't make such a restrictive contract stick."
If I'm remembering correctly I knew of another student Engineer or computer tech that I knew had signed the contract as it stood and was later contacted and I think actually went to the next stages of gaining a job.
Any way I can think to look at it that contract, it was a contradiction of it's stated purpose, anyone who would sign it unchanged wasn't someone I'd trust to actually keep the spirit or letter of any contract they had signed.
hmelton
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ECSNorway Wrote:A lot of businesses make it a part of the standard employment contract that any copyrightable work you create while in their employ is theirs, period, even if you never work on it during office hours or use the employer's resources for it. Having been a freelancer in the gaming industry, it's one of my standard interview questions. On my first day at Touche Ross, way back in 1989, I found a rule like this in the employee handbook. As I had just signed the contract for I.S.T. only a couple months earlier, I immediately went to my manager and told her it was a dealbreaker. It escalated all the way up to a VP before a ruling was made that it only applied if I wrote the book on company time and company equipment.
-- Bob
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...and my shoes began to squeak.
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hmelton Wrote:Given the scope of the main company's products at the time I would have been signing away my right to actually use my EE degree for the rest of my life and most of the rights to my minor in ME even a significant part of my Major in programming.
Don't get me wrong they were all very nice both the recruiter and legal departments, but the legal department said that they felt since they were taking a big chance on hiring an engineer just starting out and they needed extra protection because I would be learning a lot from my first engineering job and that knowledge was theirs and they were taking steps to protect that as much as possible.
What was really more telling than the 15 to 20 minute very clear explanation was the statement by the legal interns made at the end just before they sent me back to the recruiters office. "Just sign it and ignore that part, we know it's restrictive, impossible to enforce or follow and besides it won't stand up in any county, state or federal court of law." Most of the problem I have with this... it isn't that even though they can't win with that sort of overly restrictive language in the contract... given the way America tends to work anymore, can any worker afford to fight it out to retain the career they've invested in when the lawyers come knocking to enforce the terms via court proceedings? I do believe that Ben "Gryphon" Hutchins had to effectively walk away from any sort of journalism career, and his no-compete clause from his former employer was only good for a couple of years. Even the shortest period I've heard of basically means you have to find a stopgap employment, assuming you can exit the career and then reenter once the no-compete clause has expired.
I also, of course, take issue with the "all your work are belong to us" clauses, because you either have to stifle any sort of related output, or keep that output private and hope that, when you're out from under the clause later, that you can manage to keep the release of it slow enough that they can't point at it and claim you created it while working for them.
I know why some of these clauses are in place. They're to keep you from taking important information to a competitor ("hope you can get a career in your field that involves another industry", because unemployment compensation still expects you to find a job NOW), from creating things on company time & equipment (there's been a few open source projects that have been forced to rewrite huge modules because they found out that a key contributor was under "all your work are belong to us" clauses, regardless of whether they didn't do it on company property during working hours, especially muddy when one is salaried and can be considered on working hours all the time), and in some cases means that, unless you can be guaranteed 30+ years of working for that firm and a retirement fund, you might as well start planning a career field change NOW.
I've got a current list, should I get into those sorts of contracts, of key exceptions to some of the clauses that are dealbreaking if I can't get them. And only a couple involve "existing customer relationships" with regards to some freelancing I've done.
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Most of those kinds of clauses aren't enforceable in court, which is why those contracts always have a clause somewhere near the bottom that states that the unenforceability of any clause does not invalidate the contract, and the invalid clause can be severed from the document without affecting anything else. Basically, they include stuff like that to see what they can get away with. It's all about scare tactics, and seeing who will push back in court, and who will just walk away from their careers to avoid the threat of court action.
I had a job like that. I was working as a bookkeeper for a while, and the guy who ran the company pulled us in after a few weeks of trial runs, to put this three page document in front of us. I've still got a copy stored in a file folder somewhere. I took it to my lawyer, and after he read it, he laughed, and told me he wanted to know who wrote such a piece of ridiculous garbage, because he wanted to buy him a drink! If the document had, in theory, stood up in court, anyone signing it would have agreed that the entire field of accounting was covered under his proprietary trade secrets, and that any attempt to practice any of those "trade secrets" would result in the offending party being charged an amount, agreed upon in advance in the document, to be 150% of the full value of all monies and dollar-value items received by the former employee, as determined by the employer, in his sole opinion.
Oh, and the non-competition clause was set for 25 years.
The whole thing was a piece of trash, and the lawyer assured me that not a single clause was actually enforceable in a court of law. a halfway competent lawyer could get the whole thing thrown out. The reason? While a company can require agreements that you won't immediately go work for their direct competition, or solicit their clients, no one is allowed to prevent you from earning a living. That's simply illegal. And as for signing something that gives away that right... you can't. There's a whole range of rights a person has that they can't sign away, no matter how willingly they may be attempting to. One of those rights is the right to earn a living.
Best advice I could ever give you, is always, always, ALWAYS tell the employer that you want your lawyer to have a look over the contract, and you'll get back to them the next day. Then find a lawyer you trust, and ask if he can give it a quick once-over and give you their advice.
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Bob Schroeck Wrote:Helen pointed me at this: The board of education for Prince George County in Maryland is intending on implementing a policy whereby they will lay claim to any and all copyrights on any creative act by a student or teacher, in school or out.
Washington Post article here.
Wired article here.
Or just Google on "maryland school copyright grab" for dozens more articles.
Frankly, it's not going to work -- the basics of copyright law are designed to prevent someone from swooping in and stealing a copyright like this. They may make it part of the employment contract for the teachers, in which their creative efforts for the classroom become "work for hire" like so many writers have done for decades. But they cannot simply claim the children's copyrights -- they have to negotiate with each child's legal guardians and get a signed agreement ceding the copyright. If they try this, they're going to end up in a lot of legal trouble. Which just reinforces my already low opinion of the PG county school system.
CattyNebulart
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DRAG0NFLIGHT Wrote:Oh, and the non-competition clause was set for 25 years.
I would love a non-compete like that... in Germany you need to be paid your salary as long as the non-compete is in effect.  Yay early retirement.
E: "Did they... did they just endorse the combination of the JSDF and US Army by showing them as two lesbian lolicons moving in together and holding hands and talking about how 'intimate' they were?"
B: "Have you forgotten so soon? They're phasing out Don't Ask, Don't Tell."
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Oh, I like that. It neatly wraps up protection for the employee's right to earn a living, by setting conditions so that the company they're leaving will want to keep the non-competition time period as low as possible. Odds are, the only agreements in standard contracts there specify not being allowed to directly solicit their clients for a time period, but there probably aren't many other restrictions.
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