alien_blueprint's Journal: Intellectual Property Agreement Episode II - The Resolution

When last we left our hero, he had refused to submit to the "all your base are belong to us" IP agreement, and had parried with some proposed changes of his own. And now, back to the action ...

So, I'd sent off the proposed wording to my new manager, and from there it had gone to the local legal people, and from there to the external legal people the company keeps around to consult on such things.

The good news is that it was a complete victory for me. When the project manager read out the reply from the legal experts, I just couldn't believe what I was hearing. I had to get a copy for myself, it was so astounding.

I can't reproduce any of it here I don't think, but basically it said (loosely translated from legalese): "This is a problem. He's right, these claims over all IP produced are not legitimate. We need to not only fix this for him, but for all new employees from this point on, for all time. Did anyone with half a clue even look at this?"

So, it's a total victory. They incorporated what I wanted using, I admit, much better wording than mine and I am satisfied. Doesn't happen often. Not only that, but everyone joining from now on will get the benefit of my sticking my neck out. So remember to thank me if it ever ends up being you!

I'm also extremely pleased to have fixed a stupid and broken thing in the company before I even started. Or at least to have been the catalyst for it. It's amazing to think that no-one could have questioned this before, and that as far as I can tell it wasn't really looked at very closely by legal people at all. I'd always assumed, when reading these things, that at least it was written by competent and qualified people - but now all bets are off. From this point on I'm going to assume all employment agreements were just thrown together by howler monkeys based on fragments from random sources, and given an overlay of even more evil just for fun - and that therefore all of it is highly questionable and won't stand up to even the slightest scrutiny.