Re: Informix vs Oracle, alleged trade secret theft

On Wed, 29 Jan 97 19:03:11 GMT, toms382_at_worldnet.att.net (T. Scheeler) wrote:

>In article <32EF9942.1DE3_at_worldnet.att.net>, netac <netac_at_worldnet.att.net> wrote:
>..
>> I have no problems with non-disclosures that allows the company to have
>>the rights for work I do for them while employed by them. I certainly
>>wouldn't expect to be able to take my source code from one company, move
>>to their competitor and just recompile it there and give them a system.
>>However, I do expect to be able to take a new job and take my brain with
>>me. My brain consists of things I have learned at every job I have
>>held, and no one has the rights to that. This is where these cases go
>>to far. If on my current job I become skilled in Oracle 7, and then
>>take a new job, my orignal company does not have the rights to my Oracle
>>skills that I take with me to my new job. Unfortunately, this is what
>>companies are doing. They want to own your skills and your mind and
>>claim you can't take it anywhere else, not just your tangible work
>>output...
>
>You've missed the entire point: it is not "your knowledge" that an employment
>contract hampers, but that knowledge you gain of company secrets. Your
>knowledge of Oracle 7 is general and freely available; a companies secrets are
>not. Nonetheless, Oracle has nothing to gain from Informix, unless it wants to
>take a giant leap backwards.
>
>Tom Scheeler

I already responded to a specific issue raised in this thread, but your comments look like a good place to post my, somewhat different, more general opinion I have on the topic.

(By the way, while this is a technical forum, quite a few participants obviously took the employment implications and employee exposures to the hart, and I believe its appropriate to advance this discussion).

Note: I will exclude the 'theft' or taking various documents etc from a company from this discussion. This is an obvious breach of the law and should be punished accordingly.

I agree in principal that the companies have to protect the company / trade secrets. I also agree in principal that this protection could be embodied in the employment contracts.

Where I have the principal disagreement is that I believe that the non-disclosure should be universal during a period while the information is sensitive, and that it should have nothing to do where is one working at the time.

To clarify, I believe that an employee should be obliged (morally and/or contractually) not to disclose the sensitive information during his/her period of employment as well as after leaving the company. If the employee abides to this obligation, then it really does not matter who he works for at the time: the original employer, the competitor or some other, non-competitive company. I feel that this is a common sense. If someone wants to harm a company they can do it during their employment for the company or afterwards whoever they work for. That type of behaviour should be dealt with, but does have nothing or hardly anything to do with who is one nominally working for, after terminating the original employment.

I believe that there is something else behind these clauses which restrict the employment prospects. I cynically believe that the originators of this style might have actually wanted to 'starve' the competition of the talent in the particular know-how area. This type of contract clauses was intended to stop the competition of getting the experts rather then getting the secrets.

If this was the case, the originators forgot to think that they, themselves, would be hit back by this style of restrictions. For every person they stop going elsewhere, many others are probably stopped joining them

--
Christian Simich, Melbourne, Australia

All opinions and statements expressed in this forum are mine
and mine only and should not be attributed to my current 
employer or interpreted as support to any commercial 
interests.