/. occasionally clues me in to an interesting article, like The Weblog Question. There are questions about appropriateness of employee weblogs and ownership of content on employer-sponsored or requires weblogs, as well as personal sites.
I have a hard time seeing how this issue could be very complicated to understand. Companies do or should have policies on the intellectual property rights of works created by their employees. If I write a blog about my work and publish it on my companies servers, that work is CLEARLY the intellectual property of my company. It is no different than writing a paper; it is part of my job, and clearly owned by the company. Mark Potts, CTO of HP’s management software business, thought he owned the content to his blog that was hosted on company servers. I’m surprised, even shocked, that an employee at the officer level doesn’t know something so basic about intellectual property rights.
The issue does get more complicated if an employee chooses to keep a blog on their own time and using their own resources. However, this issue is conceptually no different from an employee working on personal projects outside of work. It is up to each company to have clear policies governing what is owned by the company, and what is owned by the employee. As with any other company policy, it is up to each employee to decide whether they are willing to follow those policies.