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Of course I am not a lawyer (but I am an English major!), but I think many are misreading the last part quoted. "any of the foregoing" means "anything we talke

Of course I am not a lawyer (but I am an English major!), but I think many are misreading the last part quoted. "any of the foregoing" means "anything we talked about earlier" not "anything whatever". They need the last part because copyright is a sticky thing. All copyrights stick with the owner unless they are a "work for hire" or very explicitly granted in exchange for some good consideration, and you can't simply declare something to be a "work for hire", even by contract--it has its own meaning in law and (even more so) judicial interpretation of law. In (a) they try to define what they'd like to be included in "work for hire", but if it came down to it, a judge might not agree, so they require you to explicitly assign rights to everything in (a) (and possibly b, c,... don't know what's omitted) just in case they don't have them already. If there's nothing important between the two sections you quoted, then I believe the ownership of your invention would hinge on the judgment of whether your invention relates to the company's business. Also any applicable state laws, etc.. I'm not qualified to answer completely, and even a relevantly trained lawyer would need to know the state, but I think there's good reason for hope.

yungchin 17y ago
I thought the "for hire" part meant to cover cases where the copyrights are transferable to a customer of the company. So in that case the customer owns the rights, and in all other cases that are discussed in the foregoing (I agree with you there) the company owns the rights. But, I'm not a lawyer either...
- midnightmonster 17y ago
  Unlikely. "work for hire" is standard terminology in copyright law, and it means (roughly) work done while an employee as part of the normal course of your job. So that's why they need to add an explicit copyright and patent grant for non-work-for-hire cases: an invention related to the company's business might not be ruled a work for hire if it relates to a part of the business you don't work on or if you only worked on it on the weekends, etc.. And even if the company does transfer IP to its customers sometimes, that detail wouldn't be in an employment contract. You assign your IP to the company, the company does whatever it pleases with it. The alternative is every employee that works on a project for a customer executes a separate agreement with the customer to assign IP.

yungchin 17y ago

I thought the "for hire" part meant to cover cases where the copyrights are transferable to a customer of the company. So in that case the customer owns the rights, and in all other cases that are discussed in the foregoing (I agree with you there) the company owns the rights. But, I'm not a lawyer either...

midnightmonster 17y ago
Unlikely. "work for hire" is standard terminology in copyright law, and it means (roughly) work done while an employee as part of the normal course of your job. So that's why they need to add an explicit copyright and patent grant for non-work-for-hire cases: an invention related to the company's business might not be ruled a work for hire if it relates to a part of the business you don't work on or if you only worked on it on the weekends, etc.. And even if the company does transfer IP to its customers sometimes, that detail wouldn't be in an employment contract. You assign your IP to the company, the company does whatever it pleases with it. The alternative is every employee that works on a project for a customer executes a separate agreement with the customer to assign IP.