Wondering if any fellow in house counsels have experience with this: family of a deceased employee who was at the company for a long time found many different notebooks which had notes from projects he worked on over the years. Family asked if the company would like to keep the notebooks and if there was any confidential / proprietary info in them. Would work for hire doctrine apply here to the copyrightable material in the notebooks? Does the info / notebook belong to company?

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Assuming they signed a PIIA/CIIA, everything in those notebooks belongs to the company, provided it relates to the company or the company's lines of business, or was created on company time (not sure how you would determine this).

Without examining the contents, there's no way to know. Ask to see them and have someone with the right skills skim through them.

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Assuming the employee signed a standard employment contract that states that all work performed and all IP generated belongs to the company, then yes those notebooks are company property and should be returned.

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If the family does not want them, the company should keep them.
As an aside, I worked for a company that allowed the family to clean out the workplace after an employee died. We changed the policy after someone died and another employee was looking for something in the dead employee’s desk. They found some really raunchy pornography before the family came in. Kind of dodged a bullet there.

I agree that the notebooks should be reviewed by a lawyer with skill in this area of law.

The default rule is that copyright belongs to the author or their heir, unless the work for hire doctrine applies. So the reviewer will need to determine if these notebooks were created “within the scope of employment.”

If these notebooks are like journals and contain significant personal content apart from business info, that could raise other issues — including whether the company wants to have this information in its possession.

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