[ale] VOTING ALERT: Protect Your Freedom to Work!

[Tim Watts]

There's a place for allowing agreements to be partially invalidated.
This is not one of them. Any laws or contracts that dampen competition
are at best a necessary evil -- especially when they dampen the
competitiveness of actual carbon-based beings. They SHOULD be onerous on
the "damper". Allowing "line item vetoes" (bad metaphor) in these
agreements helps only one side of the equation.

I know (or hope) I'm preaching to the choir here but just wanted to
expound on this point.


On Tue, 2010-11-02 at 12:48 -0400, Lightner, Jeff wrote:
> I saw a story about this on the news.   Supposedly the reason this
> amendment is "needed" is because under current law if any clause of a
> non-compete agreement is found to be invalid then the entire agreement
> is invalid.   The idea being that the law would be changed to say that
> one invalid clause would not invalidate the entire agreement.
> 
> I'm against the amendment because it is way too vague.   While the above
> may or may not be the reason it was put on the ballot the fact is that
> there is nothing in the amendment as written that limits it to the
> above.   Even if it did limit to the above I'm not sure I'd vote for it.
> People that try to put things in agreements that aren't valid should pay
> the price.
> 
> -----Original Message-----
> From: ale-bounces at ale.org [mailto:ale-bounces at ale.org] On Behalf Of Tim
> Watts
> Sent: Tuesday, November 02, 2010 12:03 PM
> To: Atlanta Linux Enthusiasts
> Subject: Re: [ale] VOTING ALERT: Protect Your Freedom to Work!
> 
> On Tue, 2010-11-02 at 10:21 -0400, Mark Wright wrote:
> > 
> > 2.  I think it may be a good thing.  This amendment fixes a problem
> > that the government has encountered doing business.   It may sound
> > like they just want the power to over pay companies owned by relatives
> > but that really is pretty hard to get away with unless you are the
> > mayor.  What they want is the freedom to continue to do business with
> > companies that are giving us good service. This amendment will allow
> > the government to do business with companies that have non compete
> > clauses in their contracts.
> > "Businesses desire non compete clauses in contracts to guarantee that
> > former employees, and business associates with specialized knowledge
> > of trade secrets are not able to leave and create their own companies
> > using their intellectual property.  This proposal gives a judge the
> > unilateral ability to "blue-pencil" or limit the duration, geographic
> > area and scope of prohibited activities provided in a contract or
> > agreement restricting or regulating competitive activities."
> > It does not limit other oversight.  
> > 
> Businesses can and do have non-compete clauses in GA. Currently, they
> have to make a good faith effort to make them reasonable in terms of
> time limits, scope, geography etc. or risk having it invalidated. What
> this amendment does is remove all motivation on the employer's part to
> be reasonable and thus throw additional legal hurdles in the way for
> startups and innovation.
> 
> I think it's quite telling when you look at the ballot verbiage of
> Amendment 1 and the actual changes it would bring compared with the
> other amendments. All the other amendments pretty much use the language
> of the proposed changes; amendment 1 does not. They could have worded it
> like "Should the constitution be amended to allow judges to modify
> certain non-competitive agreements". BTW, they've already passed a law
> that implements this -- they're just waiting on the amendment to pass so
> it can go into effect.
> 
> Please vote NO on #1, it's important!
> 
> Aaron, I would caution you on your rhetoric. I normally don't mind your
> rants; I've developed a kind of auto-translate to extract the spirit of
> them. But, as others have said, your post did nothing to help the cause.
> Thankfully, this issue's pretty much a no-brainer but a dicier one could
> have really blown it. You're a smart guy addressing a smart audience; if
> you can't compose a rational argument to support something important
> like this get someone else to do it.
> 
> 
> 
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