[SWLUG] Kindle Warning?

[Neil Jones]

On 22/11/2010 14:11, Steve Hill wrote:
> On Mon, 22 Nov 2010, Neil Jones wrote:
>
>> I have
>> been here before when a corporate take-over found me working for a new
>> company whose contracts claimed the copyright to anything and everything we
>> did , work related or not.
>    [snip]
>> Because no-one  else was vigilant about their liberty I was stuck with it
>> until I left.
> A corporate takeover would have protected you through TUPE legislation and
> there is therefore no requirement for you to sign such a contract (no
> matter what everyone else decides to do).

I was told that wasn't the case since continuing to work I would have 
been deemed to have accepted the contract.
It was one of my many reasons for leaving.

> I too have been affected by a similar situation and I just flatly refused
> to sign until they had fixed the contract.  (In my case, the contract
> claimed an unrestricted and irrevocable licence to anything I owned the
> copyright to which was produced prior coming into their employment.  This
> is something I would not sign anyway, out of principle; but more
> importantly, I am not necessarilly in the position to grant such a licence
> - much of my work would be considered a "derived work" of third party
> GPL'd code, which would mean that whilst I own the copyright, I am
> restricted on what licence I can grant.).
WHAT! Let me tell you something that the research implies from this. You 
were working for a company that had policies that
DISCRIMINATES against INTELLIGENT people. Authoritarian behaviour is 
pretty much established to be negatively correlated with IQ.
Being authoritarian doesn't make the intelligent and creative want to 
work for you. A good point of defence there too. I must remember that 
one :-)


> Also, I believe the "work related or not" bit has already been tested in
> court and non-work-related stuff has been thrown out

I am not at all surprised . I asked a barrister friend about it at the 
time and got an answer that it was pretty clearly unreasonable.
There are laws against slavery :-)  It is no accident that someone else 
on the list has seen this problem themselves and also got annoyed about it.

Neil