Re: Can my company take my time without compensation?

On Dec 23, 5:25 pm, Cynic <cynic_...@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
On Wed, 23 Dec 2009 08:01:32 -0800 (PST), Mike Collins

<sendyourspamtothem...@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

You say

 b)  some compensation for the already considerable time I had spent
on it.  The amount of compensation requested, amounted to about 1% of
the savings made by this program during one year.

Then you say:

* As thecompanydid not commission this work, I realise that I cannot
demand payment, and I am not attempting to do so.

So  you *are* in fact attempting to obtain payment for your program,
though not *demanding* such payment.

* As this program is a product of my personal passtime, and the
companydid not supply any resource towards it by way of time (a
program is the result of time and skill only), I believed that I was
the owner of the program.

You now know that the Copyright Act indeed does allow acompanyto own
the IP of a person's unpaid, private endeavours.  Whether it applies
in your specific case is arguable, but there is nothing wrong in the
principle.

* Thecompanyare telling me that according to my contract, they own
it because it is applicable tocompanybusiness, and was produced
during the period of my employment.  As they own it, they are entitled
to continue to use it without paying, and they hae asked me to submit
my source code.

They may or may not be correct in those assertions, but they certainly
have an arguable case.

My argument is that thecompanycannot order me to spend my private
time working for them without pay - so why can they do it
retrospectively?  This does not seem fair to me.

No, they cannot demand that you do any work for them outside your
contracted hours, nor that you do unpaid work.  They can however make
it part of your work duties, to be carried out during office time that
you are paid to work.

Thecompanycan't come into my house and remove my sofa because it
could be used at work, yet they can appropriate the product of my
private time, which is a lot more personal than a sofa?

There are several significant differences between intellectual
property and a physical object.  The biggest being that taking
intellectual property does not deprive the owner of that property.

It has been suggested in this thread that regardless of what my
contract says, it is unfair in this respect, and would probably not be
upheld in a court of law.

That may indeed be the case.  But how much are you willing to gamble
that that view is correct?

To be very blunt with you and speaking as a professional programmer,
it sounds to me as if you are over-estimating the commercial value of
your work.  From the way you describe it, it is a crude database and a
lookup algorithm that brings up the description of a fault code (or
combination of fault codes).  The same could probably be achieved via
a set of printed flow sheets.

It is often the case that a hobbyist programmer who has spent many
weeks over a program believes he has achieved something marvellous,
when in fact a professional programmer would have achieved the same
result, probably in a way that is better documented and easier to
maintain, in a few hours of work.

I have written literally hundreds of small programs that I use to
facillitate my day to day work, and given to co-workers who would also
find them useful, and in turn use the work of others as required.  It
may seem very clever and revolutionary stuff to some people, but to
others it is simply routine.  Bear in mind that once you sell a
program, you are pretty much committed to document, maintain and
develop it, which can end up being a right PITA.

If your program makes you the bees' knees to your co-workers, then
that's great - bask in that glory.  But don't let it go to your head!

--
Cynic

Cynic, you have named yourself well.

Concerning the value of my program, I am quite sure of my claims.
That valuation was considerably toned down from the one done by an
American team that recommended me for an award, and who estimated a
saving of $1.5M per year. I won an iPod that I didn't want!
The reason I wrote to a legal group, however, was not to query my
program's value, but its ownership.

However, after all that has been said so far, while I am hugely
appreciative to everybody, I think it is unlikely we will get any
closer to a verdict. The discussion has, however, given me more
insight than I had previously, so I will write to management once
more, to see if I can find any decency or humanity in the company, or
whether it is driven by the urge to screw its employees as much as its
customers.

On Tuesday, I spent four hours manually processing a file while
researching a performance issue. I don't do it often, although I have
done it on previous occasions. I suppose that others in the company
have to do it occasionally as well. It's a task that is crying out
for automation, and under other circumstances, I think I would be
doing that tonight instead of what I am doing - writing to this group
- but that would be under other circumstances. Companies don't do
themselves any favours by being mean with their employees.
.

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