Can I please get some opinions on best practices? An employee recently left the company. She contributed to the company blog and has a handful of articles. When she left the company, she decided to breach her contract and start up her own company with the same service. In the process, she has swiped some content on our company blog that was written by her, spun it a bit and used it on her site. Now, I want to removed her from the blog but keep these articles as they are the company's intellectual property. Is it best to transfer these articles under a new name, or place them under the company's name? I say the company's name, but there are different opinions. Can I please get some input on this matter from my fellow professional bloggers?
If they aren't under her name then the author needs to be the company - if you put another person's name down then you could be accused of misrepresentation etc. I would talk to your company lawyers about intellectual property and ensure you are set up right, if not for this case, then for the next one.
If it was in her contract that she cannot use any content she writes for your blog elsewhere and she has breached this, then I would go ahead and send through a DMCA notice to any contact address found on the site she's setup ASAP, at least then you've got some record or proof of requesting the content to be removed should the matter ever be taken any further.
If I may add, the articles per se are already under the company's name even before she left. So, it is safe to infer that the articles are rightfully owned by the company and you don't have to place them under the company's name. That's exactly why the former employee spun the articles coz she knows. In my opinion, the matter is of legal concern and it is best to leave it to the company's lawyer to do what is right and proper. Other than that, you just have to create more compelling articles and try other techniques to outmatch hers. just thinking out loud