Chapter 05 / 06
What Belongs to the Individual—and What Belongs to the Company
Ownership becomes tractable when Context is classified by source, secrecy, contribution, portability, and the rights exercised over it.
What Belongs to the Individual—and What Belongs to the Company
The following matrix treats control as a bundle of rights rather than a single absolute title.
| Type of context | Who should control it | Treatment when employment ends |
|---|---|---|
| Autobiographical memory, values, personal goals, and private life | The individual, with rights that should not be fully alienable | The individual retains, migrates, and continues to use it in full; the company should not retain a copy that can impersonate the person by default |
| A pre-employment knowledge base, public knowledge, and general professional methods | The individual | The individual may take it in full; the company receives only a purpose-limited, non-exclusive license for use during employment |
| Email, meetings, code, internal metrics, and customer information | The company, or a domain held in trust for the relevant third party | The individual does not take originals, but receives verifiable proof of contribution and a sanitized capability summary that cannot be used to infer protected facts |
| Code, reports, and company-specific skills expressly created within the scope of employment | Strong presumption toward the company | The company retains the particular expression, proprietary implementation, and right of continued operation; the individual retains the general method and a reputation attestation |
| A skill or adapter jointly formed from personal judgment and company corpora | Split rights | The individual takes a skill core stripped of company facts; the company retains its facts, thresholds, schemas, tool permissions, and bindings |
| Team workflows, shared judgment, and transactive memory | Collective governance, with operational custody by the company | Contributors take verifiable proof and the generalizable component; major training, new uses, and revenue rules are collectively negotiated |
| An agent that closely reproduces an employee's judgment, style, or identity | Special, personality-based shared rights | On departure it must be deleted, depersonalized, bought out, or operated under a continuing paid license; without independent consent it may not continue impersonating the person |
| Customer, colleague, and supplier data | Neither side has absolute ownership | The individual does not export it; the company may continue processing it only for an authorized purpose, with the consent, contract, and legal authority required |
The decisive fact is not which computer was used to create an artifact. Four questions provide a better boundary test:
- Does the capability still work after company names, people, numbers, internal thresholds, and systems are removed? If yes, it leans toward the individual as a general capability.
- Can it reveal or reconstruct customer identities, trade secrets, internal thresholds, credentials, tool maps, or organizational relationships? If yes, it leans toward company or third-party stewardship, or it must be excluded from export altogether.
- Was it produced jointly by personal judgment, team collaboration, and company material? If yes, licenses should be split, provenance should be preserved, and major uses and revenue should be governed jointly rather than assigned absolutely to one side.
- After the worker leaves, does the company continue operating a model that substantially copies that worker's general judgment, style, or identity? If yes, the company must obtain independent consent and agree to an auditable remedy: deletion, depersonalization, a one-time buyout, or a continuing royalty.
These tests distinguish portability from disclosure. A portable skill core should encode a general method without carrying the company's factual world. A contribution attestation should let a former worker prove what they helped accomplish without exposing confidential evidence. Conversely, the company should be able to retain operational continuity, fixed deliverables, protected facts, and auditable records without claiming permanent ownership of every general capability that arose during the relationship.
The matrix is normative, not a statement that every current jurisdiction already applies these outcomes. Existing statutes, contracts, collective agreements, professional duties, and case-specific facts can change the legal result. Its purpose is to identify the institutional distinctions that become necessary if context is the productive capital through which a person can work with ASI.