Ian Livingstone, Rob Wells & Chris McCoy - Special Lecture

This week was a little different from the other lectures we've had, with two different hosts (sadly the third couldn't make it). Rob Wells, a recent University of Bolton graduate working for Playdemic as a junior programmer, and Chris McCoy another UoB graduate working at 360 Studios as a designer. Their talk discussed interview practices as well as their job roles and day to day life.

I will focus my report on a comment made by Rob, where an employer will own any intellectual property created by the employee.

Your Ideas Belong To The Company

When working in the game industry, it is common practice for an employer to own the rights to games you create. I only learned of this through what Rob told us and it really bothered me, after all Jon Reilly (from a previous lecture) said that it's important to work in your spare time to really stand out and gain ground on better positions.

To kick things off, I'll talk about a recent event regarding this topic - (Stuart, 2014) Oculus was recently sued by Zenimax on the account that the founder of Oculus was helped by a former Zenimax employee, who was still working there at the time. The reason why this lawsuit took off was because the company sought to own the employee's IP even though it was done outside of his place of work.

Now that I can fully understand the nature of that lawsuit, I can see why I'm so bothered by the idea that my employer would effectively own my ideas and skills. If I wanted to help a friend or develop something as a hobby, I would be obliged to share it with an entity that effectively didn't contribute a single thing.

To solidify the negative nature of this, I found an article (Kuchera, 2011) from an author that had received many replies to another one of his articles around the topic of employers owning people's ideas. From these replies it's easy to see why triple-A developers leave to create independent titles, with people saying they're tired of how their pet projects they build in their spare time belongs to their employers.

To finish off and reiterate my feelings on the matter, I don't like the idea of other people owning my products when they have no input on the matter. I can appreciate that the skills I have learned from them would be applied to them, however, if their resources aren't used and it is out of business hours then I should be free to do whatever I want with my own IP.

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References:

Stuart, Keith. (2014) Oculus Rift maker sued over virtual reality technology [Online]. Available from: <http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/may/22/oculus-rift-maker-sued-over-virtual-reality-technology> [Accessed 2 May 2015].

Kuchera, Ben. (2011) Reasons to leave: studios often own games devs create in spare time [Online]. Available from: <http://arstechnica.com/gaming/2011/09/more-reasons-to-leave-studios-often-own-games-devs-create-in-spare-time/> [Accessed 2 May 2015].