Court upholds verdict, orders teacher to hand over program

The Appeal Court has upheld the verdict of a lower court that a teacher must hand over a computer program, which he claimed he created, to his school.

The school had said it owns the program. Mohammed Al Johari, an Egyptian, is a Microsoft Certified Computer Professional, and was teaching computers at a government school in Dibba Al Fujairah.

He said he offered to create a computer program for the school administration to ease paper work. The program was a success and Al Johari says he was then shifted to another school in Dibba.

He claimed: "I urged the principal of my new school to use the program and he was eager. A year later, the principal started distributing copies of my program to other schools without my permission. I asked him to stop because the program was mine and he had no right to give it to anybody."

Al Johari had alleged that he then registered the program in his name with the authorities to guarantee intellectual rights.

He said: "The principal filed a case with the court, claiming that I was not the owner of the program and it was created with the help of other teachers. He said I only assisted them. What bothered me most was that the principal claimed that the idea and basic codes of the program came from him, his deputy and secretary."

The Dibba Al Fujairah Lower Court ordered that the program is the property of the school and that Al Johari had only contributed in creating it. He then filed an appeal at the Fujairah Appeal Court, which upheld the lower court's verdict.