Re: Portfolio Samples -- Yours, Mine and Ours

[Adam Korman <akorman -at- EPICOR -dot- COM>]

Sounds like Bubba is asking for a lot of trouble, and if I were one of the
"leveraged" writers, I'd be mighty pissed. There are two completely separate
issues here. The first is about sharing content within an organization, the
second is about plagiarism/theft.

My understanding and experience is that when writing for hire, everything is
fair game within the organization. Authorship is irrelevant, since the
company owns the work, not the authors. If Bubba wants to use someone else's
writing verbatim in another manual the company produces, that's perfectly
legit. The original writer should be congratulated for doing such good work,
and Bubba should be congratulated for saving time & resources.

But, when it comes to publishing a book for personal gain... It sounds like
Bubba is open to being sued by the company -- what he did was steal its
property. Even the original authors couldn't publish a book on CardX that
was just a compilation of unedited docs they wrote on behalf of the company.
I'm guessing Bubba is not only guilty of plagiarism, but theft too.

Best of luck to Bubba. If I were one of these "leveraged" writers, I'd pay a
visit to the company's lawyers.

Adam Korman
<akorman -at- epicor -dot- com>

-----Original Message-----
From: EMMY_ARICIOGLU -at- HP-ROSEVILLE-OM3 -dot- OM -dot- HP -dot- COM
[mailto:EMMY_ARICIOGLU -at- HP-ROSEVILLE-OM3 -dot- OM -dot- HP -dot- COM]
Sent: Thursday, August 12, 1999 12:10 PM
To: TECHWR-L -at- LISTSERV -dot- OKSTATE -dot- EDU
Subject: Portfolio Samples -- Yours, Mine and Ours

     A few months ago, some members of the tech writing staff were
     approached by a senior member (let's call him Bubba) of the tech
     writing staff. Bubba wanted information on one of the products (let's
     call it CardX). Bubba asked the tech writers who owned the CardX
     project to give him their doc files. Which they did because we have a
     very open organization. The tech writers then learned that Bubba was
     planning to write a book on the technology (not proprietary) behind
     CardX. This was surprising because Bubba had not worked on the CardX
     project and was not known to be any kind of SME on CardX.

     Several months passed and, lo and behold, Bubba's book was published
     (by a major publisher). What was really interesting to the tech
     writers was that the book contained verbatim paragraphs from the
     manuals and articles they had written and shared with Bubba. Upon
     closer examination, it appeared that the entire book was a compilation
     of (unedited) sections of documents the other tech writers had
     written.

 From ??? -at- ??? Sun Jan 00 00:00:00 0000=