To Whom Do Your LinkedIn Connections Belong?
Last night on the Q&A part of LinkedIn, Nigel Dunn posted a question about a new UK court decision that found that an ex-employee's LinkedIn connections belonged to, and had to be turned over to, the employer. He's also posted about this on his blog.
Several people were shocked, but I'm not sure why.
In California, employers have always owned the fruits of an employee's labor done in the course of his or her employment. For a sales team, the fruits of the sales teams labor are both sales, and a book of leads. For other titles generating business contacts are part of the work done in the course of employment.
Employees, with or without an employment contract, have always had to hand over that "book of leads." It used to be a rolodex or a physical business card case. Then it became electronic books of leads. It's the same thing.
The fact that the information is public or semi-public is sometimes an issue but not always, and it's a separate issue. There is a cost of acquiring the leads, cataloging them, organizing them etc. and if that was was done as a result of the employee's employment those leads belong to the company.
However, it often happens that a small percentage of those leads might become friends, and the employer doesn't own personal relationships -- only, as Tom said, the business information about them.
And often on LInkedIn a person might be here on the company's business of generating leads, but might post a question here about a personal vacation and get some contacts based on that, or might join a special interest group about a hobby. So the question is, and always has been, were the leads generated on company time (which is anytime for a salaried employee) in the course of, and in furtherance of employment.
If you go one step further to read cases where an employee was sued not to GET the rolodex or LinkedIn information, but for using the information the company paid for, this becomes clearer. Often the courts will literally examine all of the contacts that a person "used" to determine if the ex-employee had gone beyond a business relationship with each contact so that the contact now became a personal friend. Or was the ex-employee friends with this contact BEFORE employment?
Friends you keep, business information generated as part of your job belongs to the company. And it's actually more complicated than that - because the there's the balancing between people not having to wipe their minds clean, but also the company's right to confidential information. But this doesn't sound like new law (at least as far as California is concerned) but old law applied to new technology. Nigel mentioned to me in email that indeed it is also old law applied to new technology in the UK too.
I'm not sure that the issue is so much new technology, but the fact that online social networks are being used by way more people than used to attend business networking meetings, and they are blurring social and business communications. And while in-person socializing rarely resulted in organized collections of data - online social networking does.
