Company X

There was a time, not long ago, when some corporations were very generous to their workforce, including mine.

Those companies created a climate of family, employee confidence and pride. People joined the company, worked there for most of their lives, and retired comfortably and proud. They even rewarded the thinkers for their ideas. Mine was a great place to work……once upon a time.

I worked for just such a company. But within a period of time, it changed into something that was not at all as described above.

I will call it company X.

Company X was huge and colorful. A city of people worked for them. That company made amazing products for imaging. the military and science. Their products gave most of us the possibilities for making images of our lives. Real people, with hard work and creative minds, produced the stuff they made. Those people were the minds and bodies that were “owned” by their conditions of employment.

That ownership that companies seem to exploit, including the one mentioned above, has some very negative connotations that perhaps should be addressed.

IP is an acronym for intellectual property. It is part of the corporate identity, trade marks, trade dress, etc.

In the context of this post, Intellectual Property is what a company calls ideas generated by its employees. IP pretends to be the concepts of the company itself. It is a way corporations steal ideas from the workers in their charge. Somehow they are allowed to capture your mind because they pay you a salary to do the other things that they actually hired you to do. Those other things probably have nothing to do with IP, but if you suddenly have a brain wave, new idea, or a patentable concept, it apparently belongs to them. That idea you thought up all by yourself isn’t your idea at all. It belongs to the company. It becomes part of their portfolio.

Most larger corporations have patent lawyers whose jobs are to produce patent applications and enforce them in court. My company actually just came out of bankruptcy by selling off a large portion of its IP. The IP they sold off for millions of dollars, was created by people who had been laid off or forced to take early retirement due to a series of corporate downsizings. The patents they sold off were the inventions that had been created by all those creative minds who were eventually laid off when the company started to go belly up.

Meanwhile, hundreds if not thousands of people are forced into possible foreclosure and bankruptcy once downsized from the company that stole their ideas.

When you sign on with a large corporation, you are basically giving up your ideas to the company.

The main point I want to make is that IP is not something for which you will be rewarded. At least most corporations have this new attitude about IP.

It seems unfair that a company reaps the benefit to save itself while the brains who thought it all up must suffer the consequences of what amounts to corporate thievery.

My managers used to tell me that in order to keep my job, I must produce patents. It is interesting that they too lost their jobs during the downsizing process. Those same managers also stole the ideas by laying claim to them by adding their names to the patents simply because they were in the same room when the idea was submitted. They had very few ideas of their own or contributed next to nothing to the concept. And to add insult to injury, they usually ended up as the first names on the final patents. They were thieves among theives.

What was once rewarded with a nice bonus and a letter of appreciation was eventually simply a way to keep ones job. If you wanted to work, you created patents. They kept telling us – “You should be happy to have a job”.

It’s sad.

If you believe your ideas are yours, think again.

You can read about my book “Rethinking Digital Photography” here.

Please have a look at some of my other posts here.

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