An African Nova Scotian RCMP sergeant who created anti-racism workshops for his employer says he was removed from his position after he raised concerns about intellectual property rights when the initiative he headed was going to be expanded.
Craig Smith, a Mountie for nearly three decades, was described by the RCMP as a driving force behind its African Canadian Experience workshop, but the two sides are disputing who owns the course material.
The dispute began in 2023. Smith now works for the RCMP in national recruitment.
“I believe that I was sidelined for no other reason than the fact that I said that I want to be compensated for my intellectual property rights,” Smith said.
Nova Scotian RCMP sergeant who created anti-racism workshops for his employer
What’s his issue? He was employed by the RCMP, to create stuff. It’s the RCMPs intellectual property, not yours.
If you were contracted as a non RCMP employee to create it then sure…I can see your side but as it stands, it’s your company’s information…not yours.
From the article, he took a leave for “secondary employment” to write a book about being black in the RCMP, which he considers to be work done as a private citizen that he wholly owns. When he was tasked with creating the workshop a couple years later, he used material/research from that book as part basis for some of the course.
Reading a bit between the lines, the argument seems to be that he was happy for the RCMP to freely use material from his work when it was only going to be used for their own officers, but expansion to a larger national program offered to other police forces was beyond the original license to use his work.
The RCMP did remove his work (and him) from the course though. Whether that’s just avoiding the mess entirely, punitive, or because they think his claim is credible is beyond me to judge.
Not all IP agreements work that way.
I would have assumed they did, UNLESS you developed or started to develop something prior to work asking and was done in your own free time.
Obviously many things can change ever aspect of the IP agreement and yeah, it’s probably not as clearcut as I originally assumed.
Regardless, hopefully the guy gets something for his work if he’s entitled to it.
If the RCMP paid for it, or it was done during work hours, then it belongs to the RCMP. It’s like someone at Intel developing a new chip at work as a side project, then complaining that he doesn’t own the IP for it since it wasn’t his main project.