Fairness

"Salisbury Cathedral meted out fairness with a Christian set of guidelines"   Photo by Judith Hirst-Joyeux June 2007

 

There is an interesting website called fairness.com. It's logo is "life isn't fair, but we're working on it!" As you glance through the categories, the headings cover everything from Education to Health and Medicine to Business to Philosophy and Religion. These are pretty broad topics. What is striking in one article is the discussion of plagiarism. This definition comes from Wikipedia - "Plagiarism is the unauthorized use or close imitation of the language and thoughts of another author and the representation of them as one's own original work". While plagiarism tends to apply to the arts, it makes one think about the application in business.

When one works for a company, generally, all information that employee creates during their tenure as employee becomes the property of the company. This is called intellectual property. The best way to define this is to use a common meaning, again from Wikipedia - "In the practice of law, intellectual property (IP) is an umbrella term for various legal entitlements which attach to certain names, written and recorded media, and inventions". This seems particularly true in software and medical/drug inventions. It hardly seems fair that the company gets to "plagiarise" the work of the employee.

It actually is a good form of fairness. Generally, the work accomplished in an organization is done by more than one person, and it would be difficult to assign the rights to one person. The funding for the project is also assumed by the company. Most of us would not be able to fund the work on our own. And, it has been proven time and again, that the sum of the whole produces something greater than any one part of the whole. This means then, that with the teamwork effort, the end result is far greater than it would have been from one individual. Yes, one can cite that Einstein did great work on his own. However much of his work is done with a partner as well. The real concepts are - how does one judge fairness - for it is a judgement, and how does one determine whether we did something entirely on our own since we are all influenced by something. Good luck fairness.com!