Geoff said:
Care to eloborate on the 'ethical' thing ?
geoff
Leo Simpson's ethics on the concept of intellectual property, or
ownership of ideas, varies considerably from mine. This is not to
suggest that his are inferior to mine; just that there is sufficient
difference to prompt my resignation.
You need to be aware that I was never employed by Silicon Chip
Publications as a staff member, instead my work was all freelance.
IOTW, I got paid by the article, or on the basis of the number of
articles produced. Doing the writing and photography for an article is
pretty easy for me (I've been doing it a long time) so it's the IDEA
for the article which is most valuable to me.
I remember suggesting (in writing) the project idea for an air sniffer
that would automatically switch a car's recirc button when the outside
air was polluted (a feature that can be found on some current cars).
Nothing came of the idea, until a few years later when that project was
produced by Silicon Chip with no reference to me! I brought this to the
attention of Leo Simpson who was admanant I'd had nothing to do with it
- he'd thought it up himself. Now that may have been his genuine
belief, but the idea was mine - and I received nothing for it. The easy
way of meeting both needs would have had me write/photograph the
article, working with designer John Clarke.
Since I was paid $20,000 per annum (yep, less than the lowest paid
cleaner!) to produce more content than (AFAIK) any other contributor, I
was less than impressed at losing that opportunity. To put it another
way, I now had to come up with a new, workable and attractive idea to
replace that one.
The project concepts that I came up with prior to resignation are to be
continued by the magazine. Leo refuses (in writing) to recognise any
intellectual property rights to those ideas, and consequently will pay
me nothing for them. However, those ideas were contributed only on the
basis that I would write the articles and so be paid!
So when you see an automotive air conditioner controller (turns off the
air con compressor at high throttle angles and turns it on on decel -
and there's alot more logic to it than that) and a programmable
ignition system that uses a GM-based MAP sensor to measure load with
ignition timing set on maps of load versus rpm; you'll be seeing stuff
based either in part or totally on my unpaid for ideas.
The same ethical ideas ownership disagreement can be seee in above
posts where it's been pointed out that my stuff has been on-sold to
another magazine - something which has occurred without my permission
or payment to me.
However, my resignation was prompted by Leo Simpson suggesting that a
huge editorial proposal I had detailed to him (for a whole new
magazine, no less) looked interesting and could perhaps be produced by
the company - but possibly without my involvement! I was so
flabbergasted I even got him to repeat this statement, which (with a
witness present at my end of the phone), he happily did. Perhaps just
after I said 'get fucked' and hung up he was going to tell me how I was
to be paid for the ideas.
Julian Edgar
