Vodacom Please Call Me - The truth

Jola said:
So, double salary bonus is adequate compensation for something that always belonged to the company (even assuming that it didn't belong to MTN).
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i was disputing you saying they owed him nothing when they do and which the concourt also found they do
 
milomak said:
i was disputing you saying they owed him nothing when they do and which the concourt also found they do
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The Concourt may have found differently if Vodacom used the prior art legal argument. They essentially crippled their legal argument because they realised that acknowledging MTN would open them up to even more pain.
 
Unfortunately this article also got it completely wrong.

The CC ruling was not about who invented the service at all. As pointed out above, IP typically belongs to the employer.

Rather it ruled on a previous offer for some compensation. The CC then rules the CEO must come up with a reasonable compensation. Nothing about any negotiation between the parties.

Would be good to read the court ruling.
 
The truth is non of them invented the technology, it was all there already. It's probably a remnant of old pager technology so MTN's patent would have gone nowhere if it was ever challenged. Besides Vodacom promised him compensation and didn't dispute this happened so it doesn't matter who "invented" it.

JagHasie said:
For some reason people think that a corporation offering to pay an employee 15% of the revenue from an idea presented by the employee is standard operating procedure. Nothing could be further from the truth.
The legal FACT in intellectual property law is that that the employer owns any and all IP created by an employee related to his work. So even if MTN was not involved, since this guy worked for Vodacom and came up with an idea for Vodacom, they already own the idea and the employee has already been compensated by getting a salary every month.
Most companies will give an employee nothing or nearly nothing for a patent, I have one (registered internationally) myself for which I received the princely sum of R10.
If Vodacom is offering this guy a Million or R10Million, then they are actually doing him a helluva favour.
R1billion, is utter bull.
There is a reason the Constitutional Court did not make a determination of an amount, they just said "while he worked there he was promised reasonable compensation", and under that presumption Vodacom should negotiate a reasonable settlement with him. Obviously they are deadlocked since he doesn't want to budge from his unreasonable demand.
If Vodacom offered him a months salary when all this started he would have been happy as a clam, and used the money to pay a deposit on a new 3 series BMW. Now since every second lawyer in RSA has him signed up for a part of the pie he believes he is owed 15%.
His lawyers also know this, which is why he is trying to go to the court of public opinion. If a judge was pressed to set an amount he would get less than the lawyers cost for a day. He might actually get R10 if the judge was unimpressed enough!
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That's not how it works. It has to be in your job description and in paid working hours. If I'm a security guard and invent a hoverboard in my spare time the company I'm working for can't claim IP for that. This was well established in court.

Jola said:
So, double salary bonus is adequate compensation for something that always belonged to the company (even assuming that it didn't belong to MTN).
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That's not what they agreed to at the time. By not setting compensation and implementing first they left the door open for anything between 0 and 100 percent. Seeing as nobody could judge the value he might have well agreed to something like a new car. Serves them right now for being the cheapskates that they are.
 
jannievanzyl said:
Unfortunately this article also got it completely wrong.

The CC ruling was not about who invented the service at all. As pointed out above, IP typically belongs to the employer.

Rather it ruled on a previous offer for some compensation. The CC then rules the CEO must come up with a reasonable compensation. Nothing about any negotiation between the parties.

Would be good to read the court ruling.
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There is an interesting comment attached to the MyBB article, which quotes part of the court record:

Ronald Bartels:

Refer to the Judgement of COPPIN J:

CASE NO: 08/20980

14 July 2014

In the matter between:
MAKATE NKOSANA KENNETH
and
VODACOM(PTY) LIMITED

Paragraph 17

The witness also explained what was meant by an “IVR system”. It was not disputed that the defendant’s main competitor in South Africa, namely MTN, provided a similar service to the “Please Call Me” service, but its service was based on an IVR system The “IVR” stands for “Interactive Voice Response”. The witness said that an example of this was the automated voice menu presented to you when calling an institution, such as a bank or insurance company to query something, a voice would come on, saying “press 1 to check your account balance” or "press 2 to talk to customer services”, etc. To initiate a message in such a system, an initiation mechanism has to be used. In the case of the system of MTN, they initiated the message by having the user call an IVR system and then enter a key code and then enter the recipient’s phone number in order to initiate the “Please Call Me”. The witness explained that this was more cumbersome and expensive than the defendant’s “Please Call Me” system which utilised the USSD message system.
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So much misinformation in every thread on this topic. The MTN patent was not the same as the Please Call Me system.
 
Which seems to affirm my point. There were a number of these systems in existence both here and internationally. Hard to say where it really originated or who invented it.
 
Swa said:
Which seems to affirm my point. There were a number of these systems in existence both here and internationally. Hard to say where it really originated or who invented it.
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This case was never about patent law. It was about a (verbal) contract between parties. The Supreme Court ruled that the contract was enforceable. Everything else follows from that.
 
Gordon_R said:
This case was never about patent law. It was about a (verbal) contract between parties. The Supreme Court ruled that the contract was enforceable. Everything else follows from that.
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Yeah I know, which brings us no closer to who really invented it as it's all just opinions floating around. Why I don't know why people are going that route as the court case was quite clear why compensation is in order. Seems everyone is just trying to divert attention away from that.
 
Vodacom and specifically Knott Craig are dishonest

That the highest Court ruled Makate invented the idea is clear

That Vodacom are involved in a massive effort to sway public opinion is also clear

I hope the court orders an independent valuation as Vodacom.cannot be trusted on any prospect of a reasonable solution to be offered
 
The actual truth is that Whatsapp and Telegram have eliminated the need for the please call me service.

Vodacom should tell the inventor he can have his 15% future revenue of the service, get the lawyers to sign off on it, then shut it down.
 
What irks me is he didn't invent anything. He had an idea (don't know if it was his own). Ideas are a dime a dozen, but to invent something to have to show the idea and how it would be implemented and actually put in some sort of work to come up with a minimum viable solution.

Someone coming up with an idea to land on mars is not an inventor. Someone putting together a detailed specification on a rocket to land on mars and maybe even building a proof of concept, is an inventor.

This guy maybe had an idea that he threw against a wall and lo an behold it stuck. The engineers who worked for Vodacom/MTN actually invented the technology to allow Please Call Me.

Ideas are worth nothing without action, and this guy should receive nothing.
 
SilverCode said:
What irks me is he didn't invent anything. He had an idea (don't know if it was his own). Ideas are a dime a dozen, but to invent something to have to show the idea and how it would be implemented and actually put in some sort of work to come up with a minimum viable solution.

Someone coming up with an idea to land on mars is not an inventor. Someone putting together a detailed specification on a rocket to land on mars and maybe even building a proof of concept, is an inventor.

This guy maybe had an idea that he threw against a wall and lo an behold it stuck. The engineers who worked for Vodacom/MTN actually invented the technology to allow Please Call Me.

Ideas are worth nothing without action, and this guy should receive nothing.
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It doesn't matter. Ideas are worth all the money. Would Vodacom have had the idea otherwise? We don't know but the fact is he was the one who pitched the idea.
 
I see the article has been updated with the court case topic. Re-read it again.

As stated; the issue was never about who invented it or not. All the comments above on that aspect are completely off-topic.
 
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This bra could lose everything and not get a single penny from all of this. Take the friggen 10 million or whatever. Just my opinion. As I see it this is either going to drag on for months if not years ( which it already has ), or this oke isn't going to get anything.

Don't gamble. Take the "measly" 10-million or whatever and call it a day. It's still 10-million more than you had. And even if all your legal costs and everything comes to 9-million, dude, you still made 1-million.
 
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