>
>A friend of mine saw my dragstrip sunset photo and suggested I submit it to
>Hot Rod Magazine.
>
>I looked at their website, and found the disclaimer for reader-submitted
>material. Essentially, if they use my photo, I sign over all rights to
>them, forever, and they can do whatever they want with it, wherever they
>want to, on whatever media they choose, including any media that might be
>invented sometime in the future. And I get nothing in return.
>
>Obviously, I'm not going to do that.
>
>My question however: Is that the norm?
>
Sure is, and it's pretty much intellectual property theft by extortion.
You'd be amazed and the ways organizations and employers go about legally
stealing intellectual property from individuals. I almost joined an
organization within the UofA agricultural co-op until I read the fine print of
the contract and saw in plain language that they had all rights to anything
that you came up with if you joined. And here I was, developing seasonally
adjuasted powders that would duplicate the chemistry of natural rainfall for
use in germinating native plant seeds.
In Germany employers can not assume absolute ownership of the ideas of
employees. The employer has a limited time (two years, I think) in which they
can make use of the ideas, and after that all rights revert to the employee.
And even if they do use the idea the employee remains as the inventor. Over
here in the US employees are robbed of their ideas and promptly thrown out into
the street. That happened to me once, and a number of subsequent employers
tried but failed.
Chris
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