Filled with despair, I tossed aside the paperwork and texted the girls: I’m fucked.
When Whit asked what happened, I told her the whole sad story—from my meeting with Fluttr to this unintelligible Intellectual Property Agreement.
MEL:
I should’ve majored in Communications.
WHIT:
Trust me, that’s not a cakewalk, either.
LIA:
Nothing’s a cakewalk. The ad business is one long douche parade, too.
DANI:
Ha. Try being a black lesbian in academia.
MEL:
I feel so stupid. I signed these papers years ago without even thinking.
WHIT:
And you’re sure there’s no way to get out of it?
MEL:
I have no idea. I can’t understand a word the agreement says. I’m not a lawyer.
WHIT:
Okay. Check your email in 10 minutes.
Ten minutes later, a message appeared in my inbox.
* * *
From: Whitney Hwang
To: Melanie Strickland; Yumi Tanaka
Subject: Urgent Lawyerly Help Needed
Yumi, meet Mel. Mel’s one of my best friends; a brilliant, funny, creative woman who’s going to change the world one day with her badass coding skills.
Mel, meet Yumi. Yumi’s a colleague of mine. She’s sharp, insightful, meticulous—and she has a law degree.
I’ve given Yumi an overview of your situation, Mel, and frankly, she’s just as pissed as I am.
Now, acknowledging that Yumi is in no way offering official legal advice, she’s agreed to take a quick look at your Intellectual Property Agreement and help you translate some of the legal jargon into plain English.
You got this!
xo
Whit
* * *
Wow. The power of Whitney’s network would never fail to astound me.
Using my phone, I scanned the contents of the agreement and emailed the document over to Yumi with a note of thanks and a few of my most pressing questions, all of which boiled down to: Can you find me a loophole?
In less than an hour, she responded:
* * *
From: Yumi Tanaka
To: Melanie Strickland
Subject: re: Urgent Lawyerly Help Needed
Hi Melanie,
I’m sorry to say, it looks like this agreement is set in stone. Hatch does indeed own your intellectual property, which includes all the code you’ve written, as well as the design of your database.
However, there is one important distinction that may work in your favor: by the terms of this agreement, data content is not considered intellectual property. While Hatch owns the database itself—meaning, the creative decisions you made in terms of what data gets stored, how it gets stored, how it is organized, etc.—they do not own the data contained therein.
Meaning, all the information inside the database is yours, to do with as you wish. You can keep it, you can destroy it, or you can sell that data to someone else.
Again, this isn’t official legal advice. But, if I were you, I’d get a lawyer. Because if Hatch tried to come after your data, I bet they would lose.
Hope this was helpful,
Yumi
* * *
The data was mine. It was mine!
I didn’t have to turn over a single name or review or email address to Hatch. Sure, they owned my code, but they could have it. According to Johnny, it was worthless, anyway. All Fluttr wanted was the data I’d collected. The names and reviews and email addresses. And if Yumi was right, I could still sell it to them.
That half a million dollars was as good as mine.
When my phone rang, I was still smiling. It was a 415 number, probably Fluttr calling to discuss the details of our transaction. I slid my thumb across the screen to answer, and heard Sheila’s voice on the other end of the line.
“Hello, Ms. Strickland. How was your flight home?”
“It was perfect, thank you.”
“Great.” There was a pause. The rustling of papers. Sheila cleared her throat. “I’m afraid I’m calling with some bad news. Fluttr is rescinding our offer of purchase.”
“What? Why?”
“We received a call from a Mr. Vijay Agrawal at Hatch Incorporated. He informed us of the terms of your Intellectual Property Agreement and it’s become clear you are not the sole proprietor of the JerkAlert business.”
“No, that’s not true. I reviewed the agreement with my lawyer, and she said that Hatch only owns the code and the database schema. The data is still mine. That’s all Johnny wants to buy. He can still have it. I can show you—”
“Ms. Strickland.” Sheila cut me off, her voice at once stern and resigned. “Intellectual Property Agreements are notoriously tricky. Fluttr is not interested in sustaining a protracted legal battle for this data. It would be far less costly to design a system to collect the data on our own. The offer is no longer on the table.”
When she hung up, the click felt like a gunshot.
It was over, for real this time. There was no loophole to be found in the word no.
I opened my laptop and surfed over to JerkAlert, taking one long, last look at my creation before I handed it over to Hatch forever. The streamlined design, the faultless functionality: these were things I made from code I wrote, my intellectual property. It was an achievement I could be proud of.
What I wasn’t as proud of? The data. Because no matter what that agreement said, this data wasn’t really mine. It belonged to the people who wrote it, the users who added it to this database by hitting Submit on a web form without even thinking of where it would go, or what it would be used for, or who it would impact. Would they have been so quick to hand it over for free if they’d known how much money had been offered for it?
This data was a record of their hopes and their fears, their anger and their desire, their need for companionship and their failure to find it. It was messy and it was heartbreaking. It wasn’t this disembodied collection of facts and figures. It was a story of the human experience.
Out of habit, I looked up Alex and scrolled through his profile, reading the reviews. How stupid and petty they seemed now.
I went to the dashboard and pulled up the database admin screen. I typed in a few commands. And when a pop-up message appeared with the question, “Are you sure you want to delete all the data from the JerkAlert database?” I answered, “Yes.”