11.06.07
Intellectual property
In the two years before the NHS reorganisations that caused me to change my job I wrote, alongside a few colleagues, a number of policies, guidelines and other papers which at the time appeared as if they would end up on a dusty shelf, or worse in the shredding bin. But no, yesterday I read a new policy which has its roots in something I wrote before and what is more contains references to other papers including my dissertation. The latter belongs to me, it was essentially written in my own name, it was written by me and most of the time spent writing it was my own time rather than my employers (the same cannot be said for my reflective practice journal which was completely compiled during an afternoon in May this year at my desk and the one next door!) But all of the documents I poured over for hours and which are now being taken by the new organisation do not actually belong to me. As employers they retain intellectual copyright and can do with them what they might wish. One of the things I find most interesting is that at the dawn of the formation of the new PCTs my work and my ideas were not deemed valuable, instead they decided that a person better equipped to ticking boxes would be preferable to run the show. Now though a new softer edge is needed so out come the ideas a group of us had about providing better support for our clinical staff, for implementing programmes of induction and performance management. They say that what goes around comes around, but it has barely been a year and boy that is even faster than I had imagined.
My teenage son has just begun his literary career. He has moved from the fact driven basis of education as it is taught up to the age of 16 and entered the world of A levels where analysis, opinion and fantasy appears rife. He proudly told me as I drove him to school this morning, that he had created an A4 page from just one quote from the Tempest. The ability to be creative in this way is a skill that needs to be nurtured both for his future educational career but also for the world of work. It might not be right and proper, but it is a hard and sad fact of life that the ability to write pages and pages from nothing will often get you far in the world of work. Whether you have the right to reproduce such stuff elsewhere or not, it means that even after the person has been discarded their words live on.
turnthetables said,
November 9, 2007 at 4:22 pm
Interesting. When I wrote my dissertation I was never under the impression that it was ‘mine’ as such, every copy that achieved a 2:1 or higher automatically gets listed in the library for anyone to use and quote, as any other journal article.
Julie said,
November 9, 2007 at 8:29 pm
Yes but it still remains yours as is my dissertation. If people quote it then they should reference it properly otherwise it is plagiarism. When you write something while an employee then they can use whatever it is and even copyright and sell it on.