Is Taking Your Rolodex With You When You Quit Intellectual Property Theft?
from the um.--no. dept
A fear-mongering report coming out the UK is warning companies that employees are stealing a tremendous amount of intellectual property from companies as they leave, costing those companies billions each year. I always wonder about these types of studies, as it's very difficult to justify the numbers they give, and are usually generated by making a bunch of questionable assumptions and multiplying. However, the details in this case are even worse. The main "intellectual property" being stolen? The employee's own addressbook. Now, if you ask most employees, I'd bet they feel that their contacts are their's, not the company's anyway. However, the company that did this study says that's not true, and your addressbook is actually a "corporate secret". And people wonder why employees these days are using alternate email systems from the one their company tells them to use.Thank you for reading this Techdirt post. With so many things competing for everyone’s attention these days, we really appreciate you giving us your time. We work hard every day to put quality content out there for our community.
Techdirt is one of the few remaining truly independent media outlets. We do not have a giant corporation behind us, and we rely heavily on our community to support us, in an age when advertisers are increasingly uninterested in sponsoring small, independent sites — especially a site like ours that is unwilling to pull punches in its reporting and analysis.
While other websites have resorted to paywalls, registration requirements, and increasingly annoying/intrusive advertising, we have always kept Techdirt open and available to anyone. But in order to continue doing so, we need your support. We offer a variety of ways for our readers to support us, from direct donations to special subscriptions and cool merchandise — and every little bit helps. Thank you.
–The Techdirt Team
Reader Comments
Subscribe: RSS
View by: Time | Thread
billions
[ link to this | view in thread ]
Address book: IP?
- The Precision Blogger
http://precision-blogging.blogspot.com
[ link to this | view in thread ]