Three things, and two owners.
A person keeping ownership of their skill and us owning what we build are only compatible if the three things are kept apart. So here they are, apart.
| The thing | Whose it is | What a withdrawal does to it |
|---|---|---|
| The technique In your own hands and your own career | Yours, and not for sale. We never ask to acquire it and we would not take it | Nothing. It is untouched, always |
| The recording of you working | Information about you, so it is yours to allow and yours to withdraw. We hold it under licence | Deleted, raw and derived alike, on dates you are told. Where it has gone into a model, the limit on that is stated before you ever agree |
| What we build from it The thing that actually runs | Ours: our instrument, our work and our checking | Nothing new starts under it, the job already running finishes, and then it is out of service, because the licence under it is gone |
Privacy law and the agreement.
You will hear other people tell operators that their technique is intellectual property. It is not, and a person who believes it will make decisions on a footing that does not hold. Copyright protects expression rather than method, and a way of cutting a slope or bringing a process back into band is not an authored work.
What is real is this: the recording is information about an identifiable person. Privacy law attaches consent and withdrawal rights to that directly, and it does so in most of the places this could ever operate, because privacy law across the world has converged on the same shape. The entitlement to be paid is created by the agreement itself.
A right you actually have is worth more than a bigger one somebody told you about.
We do not give legal opinions, and you should not accept one from a vendor.
Whether a recording arrangement affects your employment agreement, your obligations to an employer, or your position under a collective agreement is for your own counsel or your own representative. We will not offer a view on it, and anyone selling you something who does is telling you what suits them.
What we can show you is how the thing works: what is recorded, what is not, where it is kept, who can reach it, and what happens when you say stop.
Where the place you work gives a works council, a union or another body a say in whether recording happens at all, the instrument is built to take that second signature rather than to work around it.