Perth Game Company CEO Takes IP By Night 356
snicho99 writes "A US owned gaming company has fled Australia, leaving unpaid employees and a massive tax bill. Apparently many staff have been working unpaid for months to allow their game to ship and hopefully the company to recover. Interzone's Perth (Western Australia) office was created with the assistance of a state government grant. Last week Interzone's (American) CEO
entered the building at night and removed all the servers and IP so that Interzone could continue production at a new company they have opened in Ireland. The staff caught him on camera. More background here."
Dr Siktastik (Score:1, Interesting)
It's a real shame the way he left, however Australia’s extradition agreements with the US and Ireland are in good shape and the ATO is quite unrelenting. It will take time but I would expect to see this guy come to justice.
It does make a lot of sense however (moving the company), Irelands corporate tax rates are below 1/2 what Australia’s are. Aussie politicians always say what a great place Australia is to do business but globally, for anything but mining it's very uncompetitive.
Re:Bunch of Asian Employees ? (Score:3, Interesting)
Depending on which list of continents you go by, there are a lot of variations. The geographers, geologists, and sociologists can't seem to agree on a single definition, so it can be a bit confusing. How many continents are there, anyway? Five? Six? Seven? More?
For instance, there are variously considered to be one, two, or three continents in the western hemisphere. Two is the most common figure, but it's not universal.
Europe may or may not be part of the same continent as Asia. I even saw one list that makes Africa part of the same continent as Eurasia, since they're connected.
Some lists omit Antarctica entirely, since it has no permanent inhabitants.
But for all that, I have never seen a list that made Australia part of Asia. Usually it's a continent all by itself. Frequently it's part of a "continent" called "Oceania", which also includes most of the islands in the Pacific (but not the ones that are very close to another continent, such as Taiwan or Vancouver Island). Sometimes only a few islands are included as part of Australia -- Tasmania, New Guinea, etc. I've even seen definitions that include New Zealand as part of Australia but NOT New Guinea (which was listed as part of Asia).
I have even seen occasional claims that Australia is an island, not part of any continent at all. (These claims generally come from laypersons and usually involve comparison to Greenland; typically the person making the assertion has been looking at Mercator-projection maps.)
But this is the first time I have EVER seen anyone list Australia as part of Asia. That's totally unprecedented.
Re:There is much more to this than the Summary sta (Score:3, Interesting)
This is not the first time this has occurred in Australia, similar shit has happened in the last year with firms Transmission, and Fuzzyeyes. Video games, one of the last places for cow-boy businessmen.
Actually, I belief this is a misrepresentation... I would argue that these are not "Cow-Boy Businessmen", but "Cow-Dung Businessmen". These fecal administrators, give scum of the earth a bad name. If there was any justice, they'd be plowed into a field so as to provide their only possible positive contribution to society as fertilizer.
Re:Other countries are interesting (Score:5, Interesting)
Which do you choose? The second option is a waste of time. The first is a guaranteed loss. The third is a gamble, where you potentially have a bigger loss, but potentially have a gain. I know people working for small businesses who have received nice bonuses for choosing option 3, and others who have had the company fold owing them back pay. If you don't have another job lined up to start immediately, it's often a good idea to try to keep the company afloat while you look for other employment as a backup.
Re:What? (Score:2, Interesting)
The FULL video shows him exiting Interzone Perth Offices at around the same time a Police report was filed by employees claiming that there was someone in their building illegally, and this pattern was repeated over several days. The only way that he got away with this was by conitinuing to provide the Police with phony documentation, and quite probably by bribing the building manager of the office, who provided the Police with ammunition to keep employees off the property. It's worth noting that the past TWO building managers of the property in question were indicted for fraud in 2009.
Re:Call wikipedia (Score:5, Interesting)
I find that attitude patronising in the extreme. Many more than 1% are engineers. Engineering practice is defied by the discipline not some god of engineering and there are many good sets of practices in the industry.
Personally, I design and implement high throughput, low latency server software that deals with mission critical data and/or financial transactions. I consider myself an engineer. Please don't pull out either of the old fallacies that engineers are either personally, legally, responsible for any failing in their work (demonstrably untrue in civil or other engineering firms where the company may be responsible but the individual is not) or that "you're an engineer when the thing you designed kills someone if it goes wrong" because that puts many electronic engineers in the "not engineer" camp and many software guys in the engineer camp.
Is every programmer a "Software Engineer"? I don't know, but I dislike the dismissive attitude.
Re:Call wikipedia (Score:5, Interesting)
No, it's interesting that the manager showed up and seized the equipment without an opportunity for employees to clear personal data or office possessions. That's pretty unusual.
I've seen small companies closing their doors under different, but similarly awful circumstances. (Power being cut, losing their network feed due to non-payment, unpaid-for equipment being seized, etc.) An important rule for employees facing such troubles is to make sure you have all legal documents in off-site backup. Follow your contracts, but make sure your payment records, stock information, signed contracts, etc. are available offline. And consider whether to back up your work and email offsite or on separate media: I've actually been offered a return consulting job to come back and reconstruct work that I'd done and they'd deleted all source code for, as part of purging my old accounts. Since I;d been there as a corporate partner, and they tried to pay me under the table and not notify my company, I contacted our sales and legal departments. It turned out they hadn't paid six months of outstanding bills, and hiring me behind my company's back would have been much cheaper for them and much more profitable for me, but would have left my employer with much less leverage to get paid.
Fortunately for me, the key work I'd done had actually already been submitted to the relevant open source project's main codelines, so it wasn't lost. And they hadn't noticed the explanations in my contract about what working on GPL tools nad publishing them to that client meant, that they were under GPL. We actually managed to get them to cough up at least some of the backpay, mostly for explaining where to to get the updates.
Re:Call wikipedia (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:There is much more to this than the Summary sta (Score:3, Interesting)
So how did it turn out at those other firms?
Re:Not nice. (Score:5, Interesting)
Thanks for the education.
legal (Score:3, Interesting)
This could be mostly legal, the servers may have always been owned by the parent company and leased back to the Australian subsidiary. The IP very likely was also never owned by the Australian firm. If the subsidiary did hold assets I expect the parent company had security over them, so if they had loaned the subsidiary money then in the event of being wound up they take control of the assets. Lying to creditors/employees on the other hand, well there's a mess there but it's probably wrongful trading etc on the part of the subsidiary's directors while the parent's may or may not have known.
It will be up to the administrator to find out if there is anything to be done, and the employees, in their position as creditors, should be applying their pressure on him. The company may have knowingly traded whilst insolvent in which case the directors may be charged with wrongful trading, and potentially be personally liable for debts. The nature of the relationship with the parent company and related transactions may also offer some scope - it's not unheard of for courts to lift the veil and treat parent & subsidiary undertakings as one entity. Furthermore he may well be able to show the parent acted as a shadow director. There is room for some optimism here for two reasons, firstly a "million dollar tax bill" implies profits (though it may be tax on salaries that hasn't been paid over). Secondly the government grant should have all sorts of covenants, you have to be an utterly incompetent complete idiot to grant or loan money to any subsidiary and not enforce appropriate covenants and security over the parent company.
While I sympathise with the employees, there were lots of things they could have done, and given the amounts they should have taken some advice. Sure, in start-ups it's not uncommon for employees to give some leeway and "muck in". But this is a subsidiary! Why do this if there is a parent with money? Secondly, if you're a creditor, act like one. Take a look at the accounts, check for assets and file security over them. Negotiate for some equity - if they had just 20% between them minority protections kick in. An accountant probably would have given them this advice for free if they suggested that some audit fees might be coming their way later on.
Re:What the... (Score:3, Interesting)
I can tell you personally that the large company CEOs don't work "10-4" - more like 24x7.... the job is their life.
So much so that I know one that has a Plasma in his staff meeting room for when he's in on weekends to watch while working because he's ALWAYS at work.
Sounds to me like this "CEO" is just someone who's also a con-man.
Re:Call wikipedia (Score:3, Interesting)
Perhaps not, but he almost certainly would have hidden behind the government's apron by incorporating in order to keep his employees from holding him personally liable, even when his actions resulted in a loss for them.
It's laughable when people talk about "capitalism" but then still demand the government protect them from the consequences of their own bad decisions.
Re:Call wikipedia (Score:3, Interesting)
Cool, a quiz!
What is a Fourier (or Laplace) transform?
A certain linear transform that maps function points to orthogonal set of functions that self-convolve onto itself and to "zero" with others.
What is a convolution?
For finite signals, draw a signal using another as a "brush", adding up the overlapping parts :)
Alternatively, multiply the corresponding frequencies. The integral definition is a bit backwards with that pesky minus sign.
What is an RMS mean compared to an average?
Something totally different. RMS represents energy. Average just position.
What is a duty cycle?
How do you apply Kirchoff's law to a circuit?
What is the time constant of an RC circuit, and what does it mean?
What is the resonance frequency of an RLC circuit?
No idea.
What is the nyquist frequency?
The maximum width of frequency band that be reproduced correctly from sampled signal. Or half of it if you go complex and consider negative frequencies too.
What does a PID controller do?
What is a normal force?
Umm.. force minus tangent force? :)
What is Colomb's Law?
What conditions are needed to change 2 sandwiched diodes into a transistor?
Explain what a conduction band is.
What is a triple point for a material?
Heat/pressure combination where three phases meet.
What happens to the orbitals of atoms as they are brought closer together?
They become quantized due to pauli exclusion principle bringing the matter into degenerate state?
How can you make steel conduct heat better, and what are the drawbacks?
What is metal fatigue on the micro or nanoscopic level?
What is Newton's Law of Cooling?
What does the Reynolds number tell you?
Something about when the flow becomes turbulent but the exact definition is faint.
What is a Carnot engine and why is it special?
What should the flow velocity be directly on a surface experiencing laminar flow?
Constant?
Okay, I fail. Now let's try some counterquestions:
What does it mean for something to be NP-complete?
What is the golay code?
What is the hotelling transform?
How would you apply it on statistics?
Explain the difference between O() and o().
What is the busy beaver function and what makes it special?
What is the finite element method?
Why are denormals needed and what are the practical downsides?
What is a deadlock? Can you avoid it?
What does abstraction elimination mean?
How do you parallelize an adder?
How can you make password hashes secure against precalculated look-up tables?
What is the relationship with BWT and the Psi-function?
Okay, I wasn't actually arguing against your point. Just pouring gasoline onto the tough engineers vs. wimpy programmers war:)
However, mathematically I don't see much difference between engineering and good software engineering. Sure, it's working with black boxes, but if you just.. abstract the black box into a parameter you get a pure box that works with any black boxes as long as they function within specifications :)
Re:Call wikipedia (Score:3, Interesting)
So basically you wanted a super engineer that could do everything for you?
At my college there are at least a dozen different types of engineers. What exactly is 'engineering school' anyways? a structural engineer wouldn't know what a PID controller is or how to change 2 sandwiched diodes into a transistor.
I can't tell from your questions if you want a materials engineer or a computer engineer...
I think the problem is that your job description was too general.
Engineers take a real world problem or a variation on a real world problem and come up with a solution. Scientists figure out the laws that govern physical phenomenon. Mathematicians stare at a bunch of stuff and magically (ok not really) come up with ideas that help both engineers and scientists.
Electrical engineers come up with new components.
Computer engineers come up with chips and boards that use these new components.
Computer scientists come up with algorithms to use these new chips and boards.
Software engineers come up with programs to solve real world problems using these new algorithms.
For me the key difference between a programmer and a software engineer is the parts of the solution that they come up with.
A software engineer takes the customer's problem, determines what exactly they want, writes a spec, designs the system, implements their design with sufficient documentation, goes through all the testing including security testing, shows the customer, and goes back to implementation/design until they get what exactly the customer wants.
A programmer might be able to design, and can probably implement the design without sufficient documentation, and MIGHT be able to test it properly.
So programming is a sub-discipline of software engineering.
Kind of what a carpenter is to a structural engineer. Except the structural engineer is also the carpenter (but there's also a lot of other carpenters working with him).
You asked for an 'engineer with programming experience' You should have asked for a computer engineer... I think... I can't even tell what you want.
Engineering has nothing to do with physical components, it's just that until software most problems were solved with physical objects.
Re:Call wikipedia (Score:3, Interesting)
I whole-heartedly disagree with your definition of an engineer, and what knowledge is required to be called one. You seem to view engineers as someone very well versed in material sciences. For instance, you state that using "black boxes" to design a system precludes you from being an engineer, because these boxes operate as you command. However, just because you can assume more of these boxes than you could in the physical realm does not mean there are no rules to consider, nor does it imply that those rules are any simpler than those you see in physics. They are just different.
I am not too surprised though, as I am surrounded by numerous traditional engineers that insist on calling me a "mere" programmer because I am satisfied by learning the key elements of their fields, which I will then use in my own designs. These same people have such a poor understanding of what it really means to *design* software, that I am forced to cringe every time I must go through their work.
And yes, I did finish a fully accredited engineering school, and have an engineering degree. Also, while I could answer many of the questions (though some only after popping open a book or two), I do not view such knowledge as definitive of the profession. Instead, I think of engineering as a state of mind, and a set of beliefs and values that encourages you to learn, though not necessarily master many fields in order to ensure your designs are the best they can be. Whether you designs are in the area of materials, circuits, or programs, there is always more to consider than what you see. I feel that suggesting that something stops being an engineer just because he works with things you cannot touch or feel is insulting to the very name of the profession you claim to practice.
GEERS (all is not lost) (Score:3, Interesting)
I sympathise with the employees. I went through a similar situation in 2007.
GEERS is your friend*, and the liquidator will help you with the information needed to complete your GEERS application. Unfortunately GEERS doesn't cover unpaid super and most companies in these circumstances just fail to pay super and accumulate fines for late super payments rather than the actual amount.
As the law currently stands it very simple for dodgy CEO's to thieve the IP and take operations overseas. The ATO and ASIC are either too slow, bogged down with redtape or just plain toothless.
The sad fact is CEO's/directors don't even need to move overseas. All you need to do is have a parent company overseas that the IP is assigned to. The local company then operates on the smell of an oily rag, runs up liabilities and even gets government RD grants/tax rebates. When creditors/employees come to collect, there's nothing, but a bit of office equipment and furniture. It's even possible to start a new company and then buy the salvaged office assets of the previous company and even trade from the very same office and the ATO and ASIC don't even batter an eye lid.
*As for GEERS and the liquidator, chase them ruthlessly. The department/program is biased to the liquidators findings. If there's incomplete, incorrect or absent employee entitlement records (as is often the case with poorly run companies), GEERS will not pay you a cent, if the liquidator can't provide support or evidence of he amounts. (I found out the hard way and lost 2 years AL)
All the best with your fight.
Re:Call wikipedia (Score:3, Interesting)
I think that this tendency to call yourself something you're not comes in part from employers' expectations.
I'm seeing people asking for web designers with 2-year degrees and multi-year experience in Twitter (seriously, I've seen it) to maintain a virtually static page. I can imagine that if they wanted a chemist, they'd require a Nobel Prize.
I do (or did) Mac applications. No school teaches that except Apple. I learned by slogging through Pascal, C and C++, and by reading every volume of Inside Macintosh, something that the guys at Microsoft never did before 1995 or they would have known how to make a window with fucking scroll bars in FoxPro for the Mac. (They told me to use graphics to simulate a scrolling window. That was the day I stopped using Microsoft products.)
I sat through a semester of computer science at 35, but it was so outdated (and not a single prof on campus understood the Apple toolbox) that any degree would have been just a piece of paper, as it would not signify any knowledge gained, much less anything that would be applicable in the real world. The classes seemed more designed to merely get people to think in a logical manner. The final exam was something I could have done on the first day.
Not having 3-1/2 more years to waste, I quit school and went to work as a Mac programmer. Took a week to find a job.
We all know there are lots of people out there writing bad/buggy/dangerous/insecure software that were hired because of a degree, and are still rather incompetent because they still don't think logically enough to see peripheral consequences or anticipate/test user error factors, for instance.
They're not competent software engineers, but they have a piece of paper. I don't have a piece of paper, but I can make something that works properly.
Without trying to tell a story about the software I already did (Basketball stats, school free lunch program tracking, inventory database for Motorola, complete custom business accounting software), how many free-standing applications does one have to develop from scratch for different clients, according to their specs, before one can safely assume that they are a software engineer?
Or is it enough that your clients know that you engineered theirs?
As for the list of facts that all engineers should know...
Software engineering is not physical engineering. Software engineering is about making a piece of software that solves a problem, performs a function or deals with data in the desired manner. We're not building computers, we're writing software to operate within the restrictions already in place as a result of hardware choice. So we don't really need to know much about metal fatigue on the micro or nanoscopic level.
If we do, we look it up, code in the formula, test the calculations and forget it until the next time someone wants to ask their software about metal fatigue. But software will not change the metal fatigue of the computer housing it.
Most people just want to keep track of stuff. Especially money. Nothing ever explodes, except perhaps incompetent managers who have been fudging records.
As for black boxes, that rules out Windows and Mac interfaces entirely doesn't it? The entire difference between the two is that Mac has actual engineers hard-code the chips with these instructions, whereas Microsoft likes to keep the Windows interface more fluid so it can disable compting products. If I ask for a new window and one shows up, is it really necessary for me to grok the machine code that produced it, or can I move on to teaching it how to process payroll for 100 employees?