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Saturday, Jul 11, 2009
For seven years, programmer Evan Brown has been fighting his former employer for ownership of an idea he came up with.
Aug 18, 2004 | In July, the Texas Court of Appeals turned down software programmer Evan Brown's appeal for a jury trial to decide who owned an idea in his head: Brown, or his former employer. The decision was a victory for business and a blow to the little guy, as well as an affirmation of standard employment-contract law. It's also a cautionary tale for creative-minded information technology workers.
Seven years ago Brown told his employer, DSC Communications Corp., that he had figured out a system to translate data from old mainframe computer programs into modern computer languages, an innovation that would enable businesses to run their old software on much faster computers. Brown says he had been wrestling with the problem since 1975 and finally, while on vacation in 1996, he figured out the final 20 percent of the puzzle.
His original hope was to make a deal with DSC allowing him to continue working on his idea while still staying employed. But negotiations soon broke down, and within a year, DSC sued Brown, stating that his idea was the property of the company because he had signed an employment agreement giving the company ownership of any "inventions" he conceived or developed during his employment, with the exception of ideas that Brown had explicitly disclosed at the time of original employment. Brown, who ended up working for DSC for 10 years, said he had come up with the idea entirely on his own time and refused to give up the design.
By 1998, Paris-based Alcatel had purchased DSC. Alcatel continued to assert ownership of Brown's idea, and after it failed to gain control when Brown filed for Chapter 13 bankruptcy, a summary judgment was issued in 2002 from the 219th Judicial District Court in Texas in favor of the company. Not only has Brown lost the rights to his idea, but he is also liable for Alcatel's $332,000 attorneys' fees. Brown says he will soldier on and is petitioning for review at the state court level.
The case turned on the issue of employment agreements, in which it is general practice for a company to claim the rights to any invention that an employee comes up with while in its employ. But the case also highlights the more complex issue of the value of ideas in the workplace, and how far intellectual property and ownership rights should extend in an age where the demarcation between thinking for the company and thinking for oneself is increasingly blurred.
"I dug my heels in from day one," says Brown in a quiet Texas lilt a few days after his appeal was denied. "What they're doing is wrong. It's extortion. I had an idea, not an invention, and it was not in the scope of the work agreement. One idea that only exists in your head and that did not yet exist can't be an invention ... All I had was an idea."
Brown, 54, lives in a barn "out in the sticks" in Hamilton County, Texas, where he "runs 20 cows and does some farming" when he is not researching his case at the Baylor University law library in Waco, Texas. It is a long way from the $104,000 annual salary he earned at DSC, and even further from what Brown estimated could be a "multimillion-dollar per year" business.
In 1996, with concern beginning to build about updating computers to avoid the much-feared Y2K "millennium bug," Brown thought his idea, dubbed the "Solution," could be highly valuable to companies and institutions that were hamstrung by elderly computer programs. Brown said he thought the program was particularly applicable in the areas of oil field pipelines, satellites and government weaponry, many of which were still running on decades-old code. DSC, which manufactured products for the telecommunications industry, was also interested in Brown's idea and at one point offered him up to $2 million for the rights to develop it.
