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.