You, Bill Bartlett, wrote:

>What I am saying is that, in the case of a research worker, the product of
>whose labour being some kind of intellectual "property", that product is
>not entirely theirs to sell, I therefor regard the contract as invalid and
>the intellectual "property" as public.
How is the product not entirely theirs to sell? Because of your prior
argument that society, as provider of the infrastructure that made the
invention possible, owns the "property"? Assuming that that argument is
valid, it is just as  true that society has made the decision to
quitclaim title to that IP to the person who proximately created it, in
the form of IP laws. So your argument trips over its own premises. If
society quitclaims title to any inventions by the nominal inventor, and
the inventor in the course of contracting with a business grants his/her
employer rights to those inventions, that contract is just as valid as if
I inherit land from A and sell the mineral rights under that land to B.

Even if you reject my argument above, the injured party under your
argument is society, not the employee, since by the terms of your own
argument (as I understand it), society owns the IP. In legal parlance,
the employee would lack standing to complain. But society is not going to
step in, because, again, the social policy decision has been made that
the matter is one between employer and employee.

In any event it's a strange argument that allows any individual to claim
a grievance on behalf of society irrespective of what society has said
about the matter. Under your argument, after the contract is flouted
would the benefits of the IP revert to the employee, or society?

_____________
Tresy Kilbourne
Seattle WA