Returning to Auntie Beeb
I no longer work for BUPA / Outcome Technologies, having been made redundant. But no commiserating please! It's great, it's the kick up the arse I needed to actually go and look for other work, because while the last year or so there had been rather boring with not much work to do, actually looking for work is Hard Work and involves talking to recruiters and other annoying flesh-things, and I put it off and put it off so often. Being told that my job was "at risk" of redundancy, and with plenty of notice that it would happen, prompted me to look around for something more interesting.
I got two offers, and accepted the one I got from the BBC, despite them offering less cash. I start there on the 24th of June, as a software geek working on iPlayer. This is my second stint with Auntie, my first being with Internet Services before they got into borged BBC Technology and then sold to Siemens.
And just like last time, the contract contained a "we own everything copyrightable that you produce, including letters to your granny" clause. And just like last time, I crossed it out before returning it to the HR department. I know that in practice they wouldn't be evil and claim to own my personal letters, or indeed to own any photographs I take or magazine articles I write in my own time while employed by them, but there's a principle at stake. If we're going to do business with a contract instead of a gentlemanly handshake, the contract should be made to reflect good practice and gentlemanly dealings.
Your first job on iPlayer is to make the RSS feed provide direct links to the WMV downloads so I can fudge MythTV to download them automatically. Second job is then to convince them to ditch the DRM file format and use an open source one instead. :)
Good work on deleting the copright-on-everything clause - a mate of mine got rogered by this whilst at Uni. He developed a rather wonderful proxy for mobile phones and the Uni liked it, claimed the IP and sold it to Nokia. Bastards. It's time we all took a stand!
Posted by Ben on Fri, 29 May 2009 at 22:41:38