July 2008
Intermediate to advanced
384 pages
13h 6m
English
Content preview from Intellectual Property and Open SourceBecome an O’Reilly member and get unlimited access to this title plus top books and audiobooks from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers, thousands of courses curated by job role, 150+ live events each month,
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Chapter 9. So I Have an Idea...
Waking up one day, you have a flash of insight. You know your idea will take off—you have come up with the next Facebook or YouTube.
In the meantime, you help out with an open source project that allows people to automate their home stereos. You were recently made a core developer on the project, and it is just starting to get to the point where you know it will be successful.
Wait...you have a job?
You may already be in trouble.
Cautionary Tales
I know it sounds a little far-fetched that simply thinking of an idea or participating in an open source project while employed can get you into trouble. It almost sounds like the setup for a bad legal thriller. If merely thinking of an idea or sending in a patch could get you into trouble, people would be engaged in lawsuits all the time.
The more nuanced answer, which we will discuss further, is that it really depends on the specifics of what you do and the agreements you have already made with your employer. However, that doesn’t mean that lawsuits over basic ideas don’t happen.
DSC Communications Corp. v. Evan Brown
In 1994, Evan Brown approached his employer, DSC Communications, with a big idea: he had figured out an efficient way to decompile legacy binary code into high-level source code. DSC was initially interested, but negotiations between Brown and DSC soon broke down. Afraid that Brown would sell the idea to a competitor, DSC sued.
At the center of the case was DSC’s proprietary information agreement (PIA). ...
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O’Reilly covers everything we've got, with content to help us build a world-class technology community, upgrade the capabilities and competencies of our teams, and improve overall team performance as well as their engagement.Julian F.
I wanted to learn C and C++, but it didn't click for me until I picked up an O'Reilly book. When I went on the O’Reilly platform, I was astonished to find all the books there, plus live events and sandboxes so you could play around with the technology.Addison B.
I’ve been on the O’Reilly platform for more than eight years. I use a couple of learning platforms, but I'm on O'Reilly more than anybody else. When you're there, you start learning. I'm never disappointed.Amir M.
I'm always learning. So when I got on to O'Reilly, I was like a kid in a candy store. There are playlists. There are answers. There's on-demand training. It's worth its weight in gold, in terms of what it allows me to do.