Business Things
Two things: Livejournal and MGA.
1) MGA
MGA (Bratz) got sued and lost to Mattel (Barbie) for coming up with the idea of Bratz while working for Mattel. Mattel is within their rights to do so. To argue why, it’s easiest to use an analogy, but beware of bad ones. This is not like working the counter at an electronics department and deciding to open your own store. There are people in this world who get paid solely to think, and in these cases, contracts need to be made that state that you can’t run off with those ideas and do fuck-all with them. The better analogy is if you decided to open a store, let’s say an ice cream shop, and you pay a guy to go fly places and attend ice cream seminars and whatever, and buy shitloads of ice cream, just so he can think up new flavors. And then he takes all the money you blew on him and opens his own shop and doesn’t tell you the recipes. That’s right next door and runs you out of business. That’s what MGA did to Mattel. That guy came up with Bratz on Barbie’s dime and then drove Barbie sales way down. No, the solution is not “oh well” or punch that guy in the face. That’s a multibillion dollar franchise they fucked with.
2) Livejournal
Livejournal just got a bunch of shit from its users for not clarifying rumors that they might be going belly up. Within 48 hours. I read that a LJ PR person spread some rumor that 70% of their staff was laid off, and a couple days after stories began surfacing (this didn’t make CNN, exactly, we’re talking news blogs), Livejournal took it upon themselves to respond. Some users are complaining that these staff members didn’t get severance, but that complaint is so ridiculous that I won’t even address it. People are “concerned” that Livejournal might go under and their journals will be gone forever, also that Livejournal didn’t make a simple post clarifying the situation. I’ve long been convinced that Livejournal pessimists will complain about ANYTHING Livejournal doesn’t do correctly (in their eyes), and this happens about once every six months. The last time it was that they were removing free accounts without “running it by” their non-shareholder user base. Time before that it was for deleting journals that supported child porn (which includes Harry Potter getting it on with his professor). None of these situations are up for discussion with users, but all have raised hell with their users, to the point of a posting “strike” being organized (which was a colossal failure).
The point of these little stories is that running a business is rough. Companies get a lot of shit for not doing things “right” but truthfully the vast majority of people aren’t CEOs making business decisions. What was the situation for Livejournal? They previously buckled to users and provided free accounts, and now they have to lay people off. These events aren’t unrelated. I’m not saying that the bandwidth from all those new users was so terrible that they had to lay off a dozen people, but certainly you can see how a business must remain profitable in order to expand. Providing free accounts without ads is not profitable. Having your doll designer run off and effectively destroy your company with a product that should have been yours is not profitable. It’s not a matter of That Asshole CEO Just Wants to Get Paid More, but If The Company Takes a Dive YOU Might Get Fired. Nothing is black and white and of course MGA employees are about to get laid off too.
I’m actually not quite sure why I’m blogging about this, but I find it disturbing that these points ever get argued at all, as if Mattel was just being a jerk and Livejournal has sold out, and there’s no other side.
Anyway, have a great day 
This was quite a lot of information. I had no idea about the Matel situation or the Live Journal thing either. Profit is key in business why else would you start one?
It’s so random and weird that you’re so passionately opinionated about this, but I guess that’s why I love you
Anyway, my thoughts:
1. Assuming that the Bratz concept was indeed thought up while that guy was still working for Mattel, then certainly they have every right to sue him. But I do think that people working in that kind of job should have some rights to their ideas as well. Perhaps they should make a law that says that if a person working for a company develops an idea and that company decides not to produce the product themselves, then after a certain time period the person who came up with the idea can take the idea and use it themselves—or at the very least they should have the opportunity to buy the rights to the idea. Because otherwise, if you just left it up to Mattel, ideas like the Bratz dolls might never be developed into actual products, and how is that good for anyone? It’s much better for the economy if these ideas are developed into products, so we should have a system that promotes that as strongly as possible. On a similar note, now that Mattel has the rights to the Bratz dolls I think they should have to produce the dolls themselves or sell the rights back to the other company. I don’t think they should be allowed to just sit on the rights and not produce the product, if that’s what they intend to do.
2. I think that LiveJournal does have a responsibility to keep their users informed about any possible changes that might be taking place. They have every right to charge for the service or run ads if they want to, regardless of whether the users complain, but I don’t think the users are wrong to demand that they be kept informed about changes.