How to avoid leakage of source code or company information
How to avoid leakage of source code or company information. Your employees know a lot about your company and your programmers know by heart the source code of the software that your company generates or modifies, or even its valuable technical structure. In a possible transfer of your staff to another company, not only the know-how is conveyed but also the confidential information that was at their disposal. As far as your programmers or designers are concerned, the code or the designs made to serve your company’s needs may leak to your competitors, or they might be used in other applications, and so very soon they can survive far from you, making profit from the work they developed in your company. How can you avoid losing along with your staff their valuable experience or your confidential information? While hiring an employee it is crucial that an employment contract is signed, where the kind of work they undertake is described, the duration of the contract and its special obligations. Many of the details of such a contract are regulated directly by the applicable law, so that sometimes it seems unnecessary to do so. However in a special employment contract that a newly hired employee signs, there could be terms of confidentiality, or special provisions on the manner of the employees’ voluntary resignation. For example, a term of confidentiality should be included in the work contract, prohibiting the employee to disclose information in any way on the subject of his work to a third party, not only for the time he worked in the company but for a period after the cooperation expires (“non disclosure agreement”). In this way you will prevent your staff from fleeting to competitors, if their goal is just to obtain your confidential information. Or you could even define conventionally a significant mandatory amount of time of prior notification by the employee in case of a voluntary retirement, so you're able to replace him promptly and without shocks in the workflow. Therefore until the resigning employee leaves, the new employee who will undertake his position can train beside him and learn his new duties until departure of the former. The time between submission of a resignation and final departure of an employee is often disregarded and not regulated at the beginning of an employment, and so when an employee has a better job offer abandons immediately his position. The more specialized is his knowledge, or the longer he has covered the spot and the more demanding the subject of his work, the less easy it is to be replaced. As far as code leakage or designs towards third parties are concerned, it applies whatever applies for all the works that your employees carry out under your order: The law states that in wage labor relationships, rights of works created by the employee belong to the employer only to the extent necessary to complete the work. So, if you want to be completely secure toward your programmers (designers, etc) you must define explicitly, at the job contract you sign, which in their case is mandatory, that whatever they create is considered intellectual property of the company and it is a work that was created under the terms and demands of the employer, so there are no creator’s rights of their own on this work. In this way you will avoid dealing with the claims of the employees who create works (code, designs, etc) on your behalf, to have their intellectual property rights recognized upon these works, and you will be able to handle (sell or transfer) those without any fee paid to the employees or need of their consent. Elena Alk. Spyropoulou Published at: Financial RAM