Sean Burgess responded to my previous entry, pointing out that people who seek to balance their work and home life may well not be aware of the risks that they are taking.
I agree - and I think it's down to the the human psychology of ownership.
This is not an easy subject for many people to grasp. It's the problem that content owners, represented by RIAA/MPAA, are grappling with every day in the media world. But put basically, people tend to associate physical possession with intellectual possession.
You bought that CD of music, so why shouldn't you be able to tape it? Or rip it to MP3s? Well, some jurisdictions will allow that under fair use - and some won't. But the fact is that the actual music is copyrighted, and therefore all you really bought was a licence to use the music. Usually, only to use it for personal use as well - if you take a whole load of CDs and set yourself up as a mobile disco, then each public playing of the music is probably illegal.
(Sorry to break that one to you. Yeah, it sucks. But it's true. Check the liner notes on your CDs if you don't believe me!)
People who do things like forward work mail to a home mail account are basically just not thinking about who owns what they're forwarding. They're intermingling company property with their own, and doing it just because they're - if you'll pardon me - ignorant about the issue.
And don't think this doesn't apply to you. Most companies these days include in their contracts a section on intellectual property, where they'll do a massive intellectual property landgrab for everything you ever create whilst employed with them.
I've been assured that the fiction literature I write isn't covered by this, because it's not work related - but that's not how it read on some contracts I've signed. And in future, I'll have to be very careful about this, as I've written software under the GPL licence as well as doing writing, photography and so forth. Future employers may find themselves - unwittingly - asking me to either stop my hobbies, or not work for them. I'm not looking forward to having to broach this with the HR department of employers future, I can tell you...
Anyway, companies will have a hard time educating their staff in who owns what exactly. Which did leave me with one other thought...
We all know that there are mail clients that some people prefer to Notes. I'll use Outlook as an example today, but I think that the same exercise could be done with many bits of software.
My question is simply this - is Notes really working with the psychology of the user, or is it working against it?
The most obvious example between Notes and Outlook is where you move mail to from your mail store (NSF database or Exchange mail store). Notes calls a spade a spade, and the feature is called an Archive. Outlook calls the feature a Personal Folder.
See? With Outlook, it's personal.
Yeah, this is petty stuff, I suppose. But do users react better to Outlook because of these little phrase differences?
I don't have a copy of Outlook to verify such things, but as a quick test I went into the Mail Rules section of an R6.5 mail template. And it says "When mail messages arrive that meet these conditions..." - which is lovely, corporate neutral language. I get the feeling that Outlook probably says something like "When messages arrive for me that meet these conditions..."
I'm probably wrong. But basically, I'm asking IBM to take a long hard look at its interface, and answer one simple question...
Does the Notes interface speak to the people that create an organisation's intellectual property, or to the organisation owning that intellectual property?
Yeah, I could ask whether Notes is speaking to the person or the organisation. It's a simpler way of putting it. But the problem is, I'm not sure IBM would take it seriously if I said it that way - judging by the Notes interface, I think the longer form I've used there is more likely to get noticed... *grins*
Comments (0)Philip Storry April 17th, 2006 21:19:42
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