Ted Patrick - Demos & MAX @ Adobe Systems
Note: This is the personal blog of Ted Patrick. The opinions and statements voiced here are my own.
My intellectual property and Why Adobe a great place to work!
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Published
Wednesday, June 17, 2009
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10:15 AM
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I have worked for Adobe for 3+ years now and it remains a really great place to work. It goes without saying that I love my job but working for a company redefining web, design, and applications is awe inspiring. Recently I had a case where my personal software development collided with Adobe's IP policy for employees. See I have been exploring other platforms and learning Objective C for iphone development on the side during non-work hours. My hobby has resulted in a few iphone apps being developed, 5 to be exact. As an Adobe employee I signed all intellectual property rights to Adobe when I joined the company, which is smart of Adobe considering that the entire value of the company walks in and out of the doors every day. When you manage that much intellectual property, policies like this are just good smart business. So when I went to publish my iphone app, I talked to my manager which started a long process with HR and legal over what to do. Who owned the iphone app intellectual property?
Was it possible for me to own it even given the work was done during non-working hours?
hmmmmm?
So the end result was the creation of a new internal process at Adobe where any employee can apply for IP rights for their creation. I applied and have been approved for the 5 applications I am writing and Adobe has granted me IP rights for all the apps. The gesture and support mean allot to me and the result make Adobe a much better place to work. Better still the projects, although personal, have really helped me understand the market and the need for Adobe to monetize applications and the need for a first class developer program.
If you have every thought about working for a great company, take a look at working for Adobe, it is a great place to work.
Adobe Careers
So the first app is called GolfLevel and it is the first golf green reading application for Iphone. It is a fun app that gives you an accurate read of the golf green to improve you putting. What is cool is that every bitmap within the app was built with FireWorks saved as PNG. You can check out the app here
The next app BallStar (game) should be approved this week. I will post on the app when it hits the appstore.
Thanks Adobe!
Cheers,
Ted :)
15 Responses to “My intellectual property and Why Adobe a great place to work!”
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That is wonderful, Ted. Very nice of Adobe.
That's great Ted! Just makes me want to work there that much more. :)
I had a similar great experience when I wanted to publish small snippets of Adobe-owned source code on my personal blog for the purposes of writing about Flex and ActionScript programming. Adobe Legal was really great about understanding that as long as the code didn't represent the "crown jewels" of our intellectual property, it was a reasonable thing to do, and we came up with good wording for a public disclaimer.
In the state of California, assignment agreements don't apply to all intellectual property. In particular, the IP you create as an employee, in your own time without company resources, can only be claimed by your employer if it relates to their business or "actual or demonstrably anticipated research and development". This is rather broad, of course, but it's worth noting that Adobe doesn't necessarily own everything you create, even if the agreement says that they do.
Disregarding the legal murkiness for a moment, let me say that I think it's great that Adobe provides this option to employees so that there's no question whether the company has claim over your IP.
Ted, you're very fortunate to be working for a company that seems to promote a psychologically healthy workplace. Creating a positive atmosphere for employees is essential to running a successful business, and it sounds like Adobe is doing a great job with the company. Every year, the Psychologically Healthy Workplace Association awards companies like yours. Feel free to share this link (http://www.phwa.org/howtoapply/) with your boss and let him know he is doing a great job and you want him to apply!
Similar to what Josh said: I guess this seems like a no brainer to me. What you create at work is one thing, but what company has a right to what you do in your free time?
I agree with some of the statements above.
I completely understand when a company claims ip on work you do on their time or using their machines, but I would be shocked if my employer tried to lay any claim on things I had worked on in my personal time.
That's very interesting. I wonder how they feel about open source project's intellectual property and copyrights.
So I went to the Adobe careers site,
http://www.adobe.com/aboutadobe/careeropp/
and read this :
"Adobe has a new talent acquisition system. This system is optimized for performance on IE 6 or IE 7, running on Windows XP. Unfortunately it is not supported on Firefox, nor is it supported on a Mac at this time."
huh? I can't believe that Adobe would adopt such a backwards approach to 'talent acquisition'. I can only assume that Adobe isn't interested in acquiring the talent of Mac users.
David,
I will pass this along. I am sure the service is outsourced to a job site specialist but all browsers should work. Oh if web standards were actually defacto standards.
ted :)
To Josh's point, he is correct in that IP rights in California are very strong in favor of the creator and not the employer regardless of what you may have signed provided you did not use their equipment or software licenses (even then you still may be entitled to some ownership).
Just because Adobe makes web software and a few web apps does not entitle them to your work. A more specific case would be that if you created a plugin to Adobe Flash then they may have some rights to it. However, if you made a pacman clone for the iphone it would be a hard legal case for adobe to make that they own rights to what you created unless you used their licenses and hardware.
Now I am by no means an expert on law but do have some experience and have an IP lawyer that I work with.
-erik
Thanks for following up about that, Ted.
Ted, as others have commented, you are truly fortunate to be working in an environment such as Adobe. Kudos not only to your management but to the corporate culture and their choice of legal council.
While I'm not a lawyer, I have worked for a large IT corporation and have since delved deeper into this matter for other reasons. So as an FYI for all your readers, I strongly encourage anyone wondering about their own situation to read their employment contracts. As upsetting as it might be, in most US states there might be something that says all your work is considered "work made for hire". In cases where this doesn't apply, then there's most likely a "copyright assignment". In either situation, the objective is to protect an organization's intellectual property. It's actually not so sinister - check out GNU's Why the FSF gets copyright assignments from contributors. Without these measures, everything you write - including blogs, is copyrighted by you.
Again, kudos to you, Adobe & their Legal!
Is it normal for big companies to expect you to sign away your IP rights to software you produce outside of your job? What happens if you refuse? Can you negotiate or do you just not get the job?
It seems completely absurd to lose the rights to software you create in your spare time. But then I work at a small company where things are much different. I did sign an IP agreement, but it basically said I can't create a competing product in my spare time; and it even went out of its way to say that non-competing software I produce outside of work is my own IP to do with as I wish.
Maybe you don't have a choice with a big company like this, but I would try to negotiate a different IP agreement if I was faced with that. I've heard in many cases people were able to get the IP agreements changed to something more reasonable.
Nice videos, I'm just interested about a day cycle of a programer ? Please don't forget programers.