Who owns your thoughts?
Mind control: Do companies own the thoughts of their employees? According to one Texas judge, Alcatel, the French manufacturer of telecom equipment, does.
In a case tied up in the Texas court system for five and a half years, Judge Curt B. Henderson of the Collin County, Texas, District Court found that Alcatel owned a former employee's software idea that had never been written on paper.
Former employee Evan Brown said the idea -- a method for converting machine-executable binary code into high-level source code, reverse-engineering the intelligence from existing programs and recoding it into high-level language, and converting machine code into C language source -- existed in his head long before he worked at Alcatel and that he was the rightful owner of it.
The lawsuit began when DSC Communications, which later merged into Alcatel USA, sued Brown in April 1997 for withholding an idea for software. The company said it owned Brown's idea because of a signed employment agreement requiring him to disclose any inventions he conceived of or developed while at the company. Judge Henderson considered the document valid and ruled in favor of Alcatel.
Brown, who has been documenting his legal woes on his website, said he would appeal the decision.
In a case tied up in the Texas court system for five and a half years, Judge Curt B. Henderson of the Collin County, Texas, District Court found that Alcatel owned a former employee's software idea that had never been written on paper.
Former employee Evan Brown said the idea -- a method for converting machine-executable binary code into high-level source code, reverse-engineering the intelligence from existing programs and recoding it into high-level language, and converting machine code into C language source -- existed in his head long before he worked at Alcatel and that he was the rightful owner of it.
The lawsuit began when DSC Communications, which later merged into Alcatel USA, sued Brown in April 1997 for withholding an idea for software. The company said it owned Brown's idea because of a signed employment agreement requiring him to disclose any inventions he conceived of or developed while at the company. Judge Henderson considered the document valid and ruled in favor of Alcatel.
Brown, who has been documenting his legal woes on his website, said he would appeal the decision.
posted by epiclectic at 10:38 AM
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