Kerry, You are absolutely correct! The artifacts remained property of the company that hired you. The knowledge of how you went about it is of course yours and can never be taken away....
GB, Bubba From: Kerry Thompson Sent: Wednesday, June 11, 2008 10:57 AM To: flexcoders@yahoogroups.com Subject: RE: [flexcoders] Re: OOP and Work for Hire Jeffry Houser wrote: > It really depends on what that knowledge is. That's really key. Let me give you a real-world example involving code, rather than hardwood floors and toothbrushes ;-) I've specialized in localization and internationalization for 15-20 years. I'm bilingual, so that helps--that's a pre-existing skill I bring to every job, and no contract is ever going to take that away from me. About 10-15 years ago, in the Windows 3.1 days, I wrote a library, in C, to display Chinese characters on English Windows 3.1. It was breakthrough technology back then, and Sony paid me well for it. There is no way I could ethically or legally use that code again (it's a moot point now, of course). Last year I had a Director project in 8 languages, including 4 Asian languages. The current version of Director then, MX 2004, didn't support Unicode, and had no way to display Chinese. So I did what a genius friend of mine, Mark Jonkman, did--I used a Flash sprite to display the CCJK text. I can't legally or ethically re-use that same code. But I can darn sure use Flash to display Unicode text within a Director movie. It might soon be a moot point also, since Director 11 supports Unicode, and Director 12 might be usable, but the point is that I'm using a known, pre-existing technique. Sure, I refined and polished it, and I'll take that skill and knowledge with me to the next gig. Just not the code. Snippets, maybe, but not the whole shebang. Cordially, Kerry Thompson
