Re: Styles for User Guides

[Sharon Burton-Hardin <sharonburton -at- EMAIL -dot- MSN -dot- COM>]

While it may be perfectly legal to re-use a template that a client paid you
to create, I think it is unethical as all get out. And may be theft of
intellectual property. The client paid for the template.

For example, I taught Frame last month for 5 weeks. In one of those classes,
a student who works in the aerospace industry said that there is a large
market for templates in his industry. He would be happy to bring me the
templates they use at R**. Then I could make a change or 2 and then we could
sell them to other aerospace companies. I nearly had a nervous breakdown
right there. My students' mouths all fell open.

I explained calmly that the templates belonged to the company and that would
be stealing. No, no, he assured me, they use the templates all the time.
There was nothing wrong with it. I kept trying to get across that these were
at least the intellectual property of R** and that I couldn't do that. It
was unethical as all hell, at least.

I thought about it all week and talked to friends in and out of the
business. Everyone agreed that it could fall into theft of intellectual
property. So if he brought me the templates the next week, I was going to
have to refuse to touch the disk and make sure that I had witnesses. I was
very nervous about it but he dropped the discussion the following week.

sharon

Sharon Burton-Hardin
President of the Inland Empire chapter of the STC
www.iestc.org
Anthrobytes Consulting
Home of RoboNEWS(tm), the unofficial RoboHELP newsletter
www.anthrobytes.com
Check out www.WinHelp.net!
See www.sharonburton.com!

-----Original Message-----
From: CASSIN Gilles <GCassin -at- MEGA -dot- COM>
To: TECHWR-L -at- LISTSERV -dot- OKSTATE -dot- EDU <TECHWR-L -at- LISTSERV -dot- OKSTATE -dot- EDU>
Date: Friday, 02 April, 1999 6:46 AM
Subject: Re: Styles for User Guides


|quote from Jane Bergen: I would think you'd be safe to use any existing
|template, including the one you created for a previous company....with
|*some* changes.
|Answering to Moore, Tracey:
|>I was curious about copyrights. If the client copyrights >the manual,
|do they own the style as well?
|They can copyright the thing as a whole, the text, a drawing by itself,
|but certainly not the template. Even if they created the font (which has
|a copyright).
|BTW, could you send me personnally an example of such copyrightable
|template, to make my eyes go into raptures in front of such beauties :-,
|
|Gilles CASSIN
|mailto:gcassin -at- mega -dot- com
|+33 1 42 75 40 22
|Typos help me avoid these hoards of job proposals that litter my
|mailbox.
|My opinions are mine, and neither you nor my company can take credit for
|them. YOU can cite them if you think they were of use.
|
|
|From ??? -at- ??? Sun Jan 00 00:00:00 0000==
|
|


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