GPWizard F1 Forum
F1 News & Discussions => Pit Pass => Topic started by: Scott on December 18, 2015, 05:33:10 PM
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Ex Merc engineer was, or maybe wasn't headed to Ferrari, with, or without Merc intellectual property.
I hate the term intellectual property. Why a company paying someone to do a job then has every right to every idea the guy thought of while he worked there? Same as I don't like genetic or DNA patents...
http://www.theguardian.com/sport/2015/dec/09/mercedes-ferrari-f1-benjamin-hoyle
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Yeah, that's kind of it exactly.
If I'm paid to put together a car, I don't own the car.
If I'm paid to think about a car, I don't own the car either.
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I certainly don't like that they can patent my DNA without my permission. Rather like patenting my nose.
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But seriously, what is criminal is if they find someone immune to something and some pharma company can claim ownership of that person's dna...that's just nuts.
On intellectual property, I think the company paying the salary is entitled to all physical work produced or researched, but there should be nothing stopping the same employee from reproducing the same thing somewhere else. A bit like us causing a fuss if we see a waitress folding napkins at another restaurant the way she learned at ours, or a cook making the same dish at a new place. Nothing we could, or should do about it. If we want to keep the ideas, we should make sure we keep the employee.
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The point of intellectual copyright is to make it worthwhile for people to design things, especially in a corporate context.
When you create/design anything, you automatically get the rights to it (at least, in the UK, Italy and Switzerland - some parts of the world have somewhat different rules on this, and a few still have none at all). This means that nobody can, say, steal your design and make money from it without your permission.
Employment contracts with companies typically make it so that you automatically transfer rights to work-relevant designs to the company. That is where the problem starts. In the three countries I've specified, the company is basically deemed a separate legal entity, so anyone can then use the designs with their permission - and nobody can without. The definition of a specific intellectual property is rather specific and vague, making it difficult to comply with the law... ...and due to the FIA's requirements that all F1 cars have distinct intellectual properties, failing this test can have serious in-sport implications.
Outside the FIA, judges have tended not to look upon intellectual property theft of F1 teams seriously, as Force India getting rights to large parts of their then-current 2009 car stolen by Caterham during wind tunnel work and getting the princely sum of £50,000 for it (the judge stated they would have fined only £25,000 but for the "serious disinclination to provide the property involved") would confirm. Toyota got no fine at all when they stole from Ferrari, probably because two cited culprits got short jail terms instead.
Claiming something that is not really designed, but rather assembled (such as DNA) is the silly one to me, though it seems some people think that's a type of design too...
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I get the impression Benjamin was attempting to take a lot more than just his own contribution to Merc's F1 car design and performance.
I've always supposed that any employer will not object to people taking their own knowledge, in their own head so to speak, even if that includes some written or personally recorded material.
After all you can't unlearn something just because you change masters. - Isn't that why they insist on long gardening leave anyway before 'major brains' in F1 can take up post with a new team?