Copyrights

Who owns the copyrights to your work?

When I joined my current job as General Manager, I have devised processes and procedures that were un-known to the company prior to my employment with them. I have used company’s resources to build these procedures but the original idea was mine.

Now the question that comes to mind is “who owns the rights to this new knowledge”?
This sounds like the “Chicken and Egg” question, who came first? The company had the resources but no knowledge on how to make a good use of it and I had the knowledge on how to put the resources to a good use but I needed the resources that the company had.

If there was no written contract between the employee and the company on who has the rights to the intellectual property at the end of the employment term, what legal process to follow to resolve the issue?

Privacy and On-line applications

I got excited about using Google Apps but I changed my mind about using them as soon as I visited Google Apps website. I suddenly thought about the privacy issues and how secure my files would be the moment they leave my hard drive.

But than I thought about e-mail accounts, bank accounts, driver licenses data files, medical files, etc; all this information is stored somewhere in the cyber space. We hear a lot about cyber crimes and unauthorized online data access, but aren’t cyber crimes just like any other conventional crimes. Bank s and house robberies are daily occurrence, but we still deposit our monies in banks and live in our houses.

On-line applications will soon become a part of the modern office setup, what drives business is cost cutting and using on-line applications will drive costs down for many businesses.

I am still not sure when I will start to use on-line applications.

The world’s worst Spam Haven countries

If you, like many savvy Internet users today, depend heavily on your e-mails as a mean of communications, you must check your blocked e-mail or spam e-mail folders frequently. What a PAIN.

Every single day, I have to check my bulk e-mail folder few times, I have to do this because almost every few days I find important e-mails found its way to the bulk e-mail folder.

I have been thinking, why we can’t just stop the spammers? It’s a very simple question to ask you may think but its not that simple. Countries and ISPs are not working hard enough to stop this practice.

I found some interesting facts about spam and spammers by visiting Spamhaus website at www.spamhaus.org. The Spamhaus Project is an international non-profit organization whose mission is to track the Internet’s spam operations, to provide dependable real-time anti-spam protection for Internet networks, to work with Law Enforcement Agencies to identify and pursue spammers worldwide, and to lobby governments for effective anti-spam legislation.

Visit their web site to find some really interesting facts about spam and spammers.

For the first time, a cyber criminal punished harshly in Saudi Arabia

According to the Saudi newspapers, Al-watan (reported on Sunday Dec21-2008), the Saudi court system delivered its first verdict on a cyber crime. The court sentenced a young Saudi man to jail term of a year and nine months, 200 lashes and fine of 50 thousands Saudi Riyals for hacking into a young lady e-mail files and stealing her personal photos and threatening to publish her photos.

Domain name ownership rights

In my last post, I talked about the problem facing my company regarding our domain name, basically, some IT guy who worked with our company as IT consultant decided to register our company domain under his name, and now he is black mailing us, asking us to pay him money in order for him to release the domain to us.

This case got me thinking about the latest development in this field, what the law says about domain names? Are they protected by any copy rights? If the company business name is officially registered with the local chamber of commerce or the local court, would that automatically give them the rights over companyname.com domain name?

We all heard in the early ages of the internet about how big corporations would pay millions for domain names; Is there any development on the legal side of this issue?

How can we re-claim our domain name?

I have a legal question concerning the ownership of a domain name.

While back our company setup e-mail accounts and registered its domain name. The person who did the accounts setup and domain registration was an IT consultant who was hired by some of our company’s managers, at that time, no one at the company new much about domain name registrations or about IT in general.

Now when I was trying to setup our company’s website I found out that the IT consultant registered the domain name under his own company name and not our company name. When I contacted the IT consultant and asked him how come he registered the domain name under his own company name and not under ours, he said “no one at your company cared”, and when I asked him to release the domain name to us, he sent me a long bill and said he wont transfer the domain to us unless we pay our bills. Keep in mind he is still hosting our e-mail accounts and we work with very big government agencies and for security and confidentiality, our e-mail accounts must be hosted under our own company name.

My questions are:
1- Are there any laws that regulate these matters?
2- We have proof that we have paid him for his services. Will that bind him to release the domain to us, will the domain reseller take this as a proof that the domain belongs to us?
3- He is hosting our company’s e-mail accounts up to this moment, and we use them daily, will the domain reseller or domain registrar take this as a proof that we are paying this IT consultant and he actually took advantage of our company’s staff members not being IT savvy and registered the ownership of the Domain and the e-mail accounts under his name?
4- The last thing I may add, I have asked this IT consultant “Are you trying to make money out of us by trying to sell to us our own domain name? and his answer was “YES.”