Who Owns My Content?

Since I’m leaving Quest Software to join SQLskills, I’ve gotten a few questions about how I’m handling content ownership.  Since Quest was paying me to blog, tweet, and present, who really owns my content?

I think of myself as a developer, but instead of writing code, I wrote content.  Companies hire programmers all the time, and intellectual property handling is pretty straightforward.  Here’s how it works:

When a company pays a developer to write code privately, that ownership stays with the company – but it’s because the company’s usually using the code in internal software.  They sell the developer’s code to other clients.  Quest paid me to produce content – product ideas, documentation, plans, and marketing materials.  That content has always been owned by Quest, and I was completely comfortable producing that because they paid me for it.

Ghost Writers

In terms of “private” public content, I wrote blog posts at QuestKB like What It’s Like to Work For a Vendor.  Quest clearly owns that post, and if they wanted to, they could change the blog post author to be somebody else – either a real person’s name, or a generic “Administrator” style account.  I would be completely okay with either of those, because they own the content, and it’s important as a blogger not to get too tied up in where your name goes.  Think about ghost writers – people who write for celebrities.  Ghost writers get paid (sometimes fairly, sometimes not) for their productions.  It’s up to the ghost writer to do a good job of negotiating payment and rights.  I didn’t negotiate anything like that with Quest because I was getting paid a very fair salary for the work I was doing.

Quest then has to make an interesting decision – do they leave my name on the content?  If I’m living my life right, then they’d be proud to keep my name attached to it.  If I’m living my life wrong, then they’d want to rip my name off as fast as possible.  There’s another possibility – if someone at the company harbors a grudge against me, they might also want to rip my name off, but I can’t do anything about personalities like that, so I don’t lose sleep over it.  The best I can do is to live my life in a way that makes people say, “Damn, we wanna have a piece of that.”

When a company pays a developer to write code for a community project, the code is owned by the community (think GPL or Creative Commons projects).  Companies sponsor open source work all the time, but that doesn’t buy ownership of the code.  Quest paid me to give presentations at community events like PASS, SQLBits, and local user groups.  Those presentations are scattered around my blog, SQLServerPedia, and SlideShare.

This is a little bit of a gray area, but I like to err on the side of caution.  I wouldn’t charge someone for content that I created while I worked at Quest.  I would feel comfortable re-giving presentations at user groups if I’d already given those presentations at user groups.  Furthermore, if a Quest employee wanted to give one of my presentations at a user group (or even at a paid event), I’d be completely comfortable with that too.  In my mind, Quest has the rights to any presentation I gave while I worked for Quest, just like they can rebadge my blog posts on QuestKB.

When a developer does their own thing, the company usually owns that too.  Companies ask their new hires to sign all kinds of documentation, and buried in the fine print – and sometimes even in the big print – the company asserts ownership of whatever you do on company time.  This is especially important for software development companies.

Clearly, Quest doesn’t own BrentOzar.com – I produced it long before I went to work for Quest, and we didn’t have any kind of contract asserting their ownership over the domain.  But what about the content I produced during the time I worked for them?  What if Quest copy/pasted parts of my blog posts and use them as part of a marketing campaign or a training course?

This is where code development and content development take different paths.  If a company takes your code and makes it a part of a product, the public probably won’t know because the code is hidden away.  If a company takes your words and makes it part of their marketing or course material, the public will figure things out pretty quickly.  That would be a public relations disaster, because even if the company won in court, they’d lose in the public market, especially when a blogger is involved.

I don’t think Quest would ever do something like that, and that’s why I went to work for them in the first place.  I knew my managers and coworkers before I stepped foot in the door, and I knew how they treated content creators.  Everything we’ve done along the way at SQLServerPedia is evidence of that – we’ve bent over backwards to do the right things for bloggers and writers.

Before He Was Famous

However, you may not be so lucky. If you hit the Job Lotto like Tom LaRock and go to work blogging, presenting, and tweeting for a company, you need to ask:

• Who owns the rights to the content I create?
• What happens to the content after I leave?
• Can I use the content to build other things?  (Think books and training materials)
• Do I get paid if the company builds something with my content now?  What about after I leave?

When I talked to Paul and Kimberly about joining SQLskills, I asked these same kinds of questions.  In the last year or so, my job at Quest has focused more on building the community than on building the content, but starting on July 12th, I’ll be spending more time building content again.  What happens with the deeply technical content I’ll be creating?  Paul and Kimberly understand those concerns because they pour a ton of effort into building top-notch content, so it was an easy conversation.

On the other hand, if you blaze a trail at a company by being one of their first evangelists, the conversations may not be so easy.  You want to get those answers in writing earlier – rather than later – even if they’re in a casual form like an email.  In the beginning, nobody thinks this content will be worth much.  It doesn’t exist yet, and they probably don’t see a staggering amount of value in what you’re about to build.  That’s precisely when you’re in the best position for negotiation.  Ideally, you syndicate your blog, and the original content stays on your own domain.

Companies won’t always settle for syndication, and sometimes it isn’t even in your own best interest to take the syndication approach.  For example, at SQLskills, I’ll be blogging my deeply technical material on SQLskills itself – not syndicating it.  This would seem counter-intuitive to my recent post Why Syndication Rocks, but it’s all part of a negotiation process.  I gain something when I write an in-depth technical post, put it on SQLskills.com, and say, “I made that.  My stuff is right next to Paul and Kimberly’s.”  It says my stuff is high quality and can stand with the best SQL Server minds out there.

There’s a risk for me, though – if Paul and Kimberly decided to pack it all in and sell SQLskills to spend all their time petting grouper, an evil company could take over.  If I wanted to bail, I would have to understand that they could rip my name off the content or take my posts down forever, and all my hard work would be gone.  This means I have to get value out of it AS I’m publishing it, and not think I’m building some permanent empire on somebody else’s web site.  I can’t just fold up BrentOzar.com and call it a day – I have to continue to build awareness in as many places as possible.

As a blogger, you can build broad, permanent awareness by:

• Writing guest posts at other sites (read the book ProBlogger to learn more)
• Linking your posts together (pointing from one site to another, so everyone knows when you publish new stuff somewhere else)
• Presenting on vendor webcasts (because the vendors promote you to their email lists)
• Being a guest on podcasts

Webcasts and podcasts can be cool because they spread your investment around, and they get more people to promote your content.  They’re long-term investments – they don’t instantly make you famous, but as more people watch the replays over time, they can pay off in a steady trickle of new readers.  Webcasts & podcasts also give me an easy answer to hard questions.  When someone asks me a question about, say, planning for disaster recovery in an enterprise, I can often say, “Ah, yes, I did an hour-long webcast about the basics of disaster recovery planning.  Go watch that, and let me know what questions you have.”  The webcast – even though it’s hosted by someone else – is a reference I can always use.  The company can’t simply change my name inside the webcast, and the company probably even likes it because I’m bringing them more viewers.

Speaking of which, I’m a guest on this week’s Virtumania podcast, “Hyper-V Dynamic Memory Is Not Overcommit.” Hosts Rich Brambley and Rick Vanover did another entertaining job of interviewing me and Microsoft’s Ben Armstrong and Adam Fazio about the virtualization announcements at TechEd.  Ben talked about his TechEd session’s dynamic memory demos, which bombed while I was in the crowd watching, and I talked about how Ben’s session eval scores STILL smoked mine.  Ben’s a solid presenter with cool technology, and I highly recommend checking out his demos if you get a chance.  You can watch Ben’s TechEd session free, and listen to us talking about Hyper-V memory at Virtumania.

Wouldn’t it be cool if you could make statements like that on your blog? What’s holding you back?  Podcasters are looking for guests, reporters are looking for stories, and vendors are looking for webcasts.  Figure out what you’d like to talk about, and then offer to talk.  You’d be amazed who’s willing to listen.  Start building your content, and start getting it out there in a way that you control.

Brent Ozar

Brent specializes in performance tuning for SQL Server, VMware, and storage. He's one of the very few Microsoft Certified Masters of SQL Server, a published author, and a Microsoft MVP. He likes travel, Jeeps, Apple gear, jokes, and writing about himself in the third person. Read more and contact Brent.

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