The news comes in the wake of a court ruling which forced a
journalist to hand over the contents of his contacts list to his
former employer after he left that company.
Employers could insist on gaining ownership of some social
networking content, though only in limited circumstances, according
to IP law expert Catrin Turner of Pinsent Masons, the law firm
behind OUT-LAW.COM.
"If a social networking site is used to hold any information
which relates to your employment, if that information is prepared
in the course of your employment you are dealing with company
property," said Turner.
The profile, or the elements of it that are work related, would
belong to the employer despite the fact that it was created and is
hosted in a virtual environment primarily designed for personal
interaction.
"If [the employer] can argue that you have created something and
it's in the course of your employment, it's irrelevant where it's
stored because the law doesn't look at where it's stored, the law
looks at the circumstances in which it was created," she said. "If
you create a contact list or any sort of document during working
hours using your work PC that relates in some way to your job or is
of value to your employer they would have a very strong argument
that that belongs to them."
The case of Junior Isles and conference and publishing business
PennWell Publishing has highlighted the fact that employers can own
an employee's digital creations and that that ownership can extend
further than some workers may realise.
Isles brought a list of journalistic contacts to his job at
PennWell and added to it while working there. When he left to set
up a rival company PennWell objected to his taking the contacts
list with him.
Isles claimed that the contacts list was his personal
information and that only 20% of it was added while he worked for
PennWell. He also said that it would breach his human rights to
take it from him and deprive him of his right to free journalistic
expression.
The Court ruled that the list belonged to PennWell. It said that
if he had maintained a separate list of contacts for personal
purposes and added selectively to it, he could have kept that. It
also said that he could have taken his personal contacts and any
that he brought to the firm in the first place with him.
Because Isles had tried to take the whole list, PennWell was
allowed to keep the database of contacts and was also granted an
injunction preventing Isles from using the database. The company
did allow Isles to keep and use the contacts he had brought to the
firm, though.
The ruling confirmed the right of an employer to treat as its
own property the creations of its employees if they were made in
the course of business. That includes digital creations, even if
some of that creation is for personal purposes.
Turner said that though a company's internet and email usage
policies were important, it was not necessary to state the
potential claim in them because the basis of that claim was fixed
in the law.
"The basic law is that if you create copyright material,
something you write or type into a computer, you take photographs,
you do cartoons, you potentially create film, if that is created in
the course of your employment then the assumption is that that
belongs to your employer, so that doesn't have to be written down
by your employer," she said.
Turner said that social networking sites and the material a
person creates for them do not exist in a vacuum, that they do
interact with working life, but that most users do not realise
this.
"They may think that social networking is something which
doesn't affect their work relationship, but it certainly does," she
said.
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