Seattle small tech business gathering

Seattle small tech business gathering

- Catch up, see how everyone's been doing

- IP law

Four kinds of IP to worry about: patents, trademarks, copyright, trade secrets.

Copyright is something you have automatically. It helps to put the (C) on your copyrighted work, just to signal that it is protected by copyright, and to register your copyright with the government. Registering is really cheap ($25-40) and basically means that if anyone takes you to court over copyright, you have real easy proof that you do own the copyright to the work.

With trade secrets, you also own them automatically, but only if you take "necessary precautions" to protect the secrets. With trade secrets, if someone is taking your idea, you can sue them even if there is no patent on the idea. It's harder, though, because this doesn't cover things like someone reverse engineering your idea.

Trademarks aren't as heavily used in software as the other concepts-- they're mostly for designs, logos, and names.

Patents are important. They're the most solid form of protection on your work. If you just filed a patent, it typically takes 2 years to go through the patent office and get approved, and you can make no changes to the patent during this process. That's why people sometimes go for provisional patents. A provisional patent allows you to make changes to your patent filing a year after you submit the provisional patent. After that year, a regular patent is submitted and you wait two years for that to be processed. Filing a patent is important, because even if you don't wait until it's approved, having that "place in line" is powerful legal defense for you indeed owning the idea.

Free and open source code is protected by copyright, and typically does not need to be patented. People just need to use your code in accordance with your copyright license.

- Hiring employees

Working with people well is really important. As small businesses, we should question the norms and try to do as good of a job to take care of people through our ability to hire people as possible.

The key is helping people grow, and making them feel independent as possible, and creating better practices in our industry by setting an example.

We should pay people as much as we can, and upfront as much as we can, so that they feel like they can leave if they need to.

We should also actively encourage people to speak out and disagree. Software developers typically aren't taught that they should negotiate, push back, work well with design, etc. Fostering software skills is an obvious need, but fostering good people skills is even more important.

We should use our ability to hire, whether it be full time or contractors, to better people and our communities.

- Employee rights

It's total bullshit for companies to own employees' work, if it doesn't pass the 3 part test: 1) on company property 2) on company time 3) in that company's *specific* field. There was a case of a UI designer who won the right to do UI design and own his design's outside of company time, for example. If this is true, it must also overlap with the trend we've been seeing for companies to try to silence employees' speech. Employees should be able to write and speak on topics they'd like.

The game industry really needs unions. Meetings like this are a start, but one of the core problems is that employees themselves foster this culture. We've all been yelled at-- by other employees!-- for not staying till 11 PM some nights working. How on earth do we expect unions to happen if that's the culture?! One individual can have a great impact on culture shifts. We need to start by promoting the idea of healthy work-life balance.

- Open offices

Open offices remain overall terrible, but an affordable and common option. Decent for collaboration. Hard to discuss problems, develop relationships, and focus.

Several good open office coworking spaces are opening up in Seattle, some specializing in VR or tech startups.