4 ms·
No. Emails are considered correspondence, not IP: https://www.quora.com/Is-an-email-message-considered-intellectual-property https://www.quora.com/Is-an-email-m
by Hydraulix989 10y ago
No. Emails are considered correspondence, not IP:
https://www.quora.com/Is-an-email-message-considered-intellectual-property https://www.quora.com/Is-an-email-message-considered-intelle...
As for clean room implementations, that is true, except in California.
Here, it does not really hold in court at all:
You can leave one company to join another doing more or less the same thing (because non-competition clauses are banned here), as long as you do not copy the code itself.
It sounds like you and your uncle post are both programmers trying to look at things too much from a logically moral perspective, rather than actually how the courts view these things, since you aren't very familiar with the latter.
- dleslie 10y agoAre the attachments considered correspondence? If so, what's to prevent me from attaching all of the company's code to my email and later walking away with it?
- Hydraulix989 10y agoAttachments are considered files, and generally courts don't react too friendly whenever they find out that you were trying to be clever and use some sort of "loophole" like that.
- dleslie 10y agoThat's what I figured. I don't think it's unlikely that among the thousands of emails Carmack downloaded on his last day, that some of those which involved working with an external developer would have included such attachments.
- Hydraulix989 10y agoYeah, that's a detail for the courts to resolve -- whether Carmack was downloading the emails Hillary Clinton style or not.
- R00sterIllusi0n 10y agoI think it is safe to say the emails have nothing to do with stealing code. He copied his email history so he could personally have it. Lots of people do this when leaving a job, even when they are not supposed to. It is your correspondence for the last X number of years, you want a personal copy. Carmack would have a greater incentive to copy the emails since he clearly was blurring the lines between personal work and private work while working for id which was inherited by zenimax when they bought id.
- Hydraulix989 10y agoSure, and that's probably part of the reason why emails aren't considered intellectual property.
- jpab 10y agoI don't think California is the relevant jurisdiction here. The quote from ZeniMax in the article is "With the start of the trial of our case in Federal District Court in Dallas [...]" Carmack lives and works in Texas. In fact I think (though I don't have a citation for it) Carmack's choice to stay in Texas is the reason Oculus has a Dallas office. Of course Oculus and Facebook headquarters are in California. ZeniMax headquarters (according to Wikipedia) are in Maryland.
- Hydraulix989 10y agoThe parties always strive to get the most favorable jurisdiction for their cases. That is why Samsung built an ice skating rink in front of the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Texas -- to lobby the judges who heavily favor patent holders -- literally thousands of patent infringement suits are filed in this particular court because of this.