4 ms·

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 rig

• 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.