4 ms·

I was at a larger company and tried to play ball with their policies for personal work. My contract gave them "right of first refusal" and had a space for excl

by pfranz 10y ago

I was at a larger company and tried to play ball with their policies for personal work. My contract gave them "right of first refusal" and had a space for exclusions of things you were working on outside of work. Some friends weren't allowed to continue contributing to a few Open Source projects...which seemed excessive, but makes sense if they're overly cautious. I mentioned I was helping a friend on a short film. I was just showing up on set and possibly doing technical stuff on editing and mixing. I asked, "It's not my project, I'm just helping out. What would you like to see from the project?" "Everything" "Really? We haven't started shooting. Does that mean the script? Raw footage? The final edit?" "Everything" I don't think they actually knew anything at all about what I was talking about (even though it was multi-gigabytes of information) and they handed it all over to a co-worker. I think the lesson is to think about where they're coming from. The lawyer is paid to cover the company's ass and they may not even have the expertise to make the right call, so they'll error on the side of being safe.

delinka 10y ago
This situation sounds terrible. Were you writing software for your employer? Why would you have told them you were volunteering non-coding assistance to a film production? Did they honestly think they had the right to require you show them copyrightable works created by other people who were not their employees? Did you truly take those creations and show them to your employer? This whole situation sounds ludicrous and should never have been required to happen by management in a company whose focus is creating software.
- pfranz 10y ago
  It was a large animation studio and I was a guy who monitored their render farm. So they were making content and I would write tools (Python, Perl, and Shell scripts) and did have access to their whole codebase. I told them because there was a box in my contract (I was new to the industry) and the last thing I wanted was to have my friend's short film litigated against. It's weird because I'm not sure what I'd do different. In that case I probably wouldn't tell them, but I often have side projects that might be profitable. Often I'd see artists working on short-films or publishing their own art books and they would sometimes be internal events promoting those things. I'm not sure if there was just some "understanding" I didn't quite get or if tech and art were treated separately.
deleted 10y ago
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by pfranz 10y ago

delinka 10y ago

This situation sounds terrible. Were you writing software for your employer? Why would you have told them you were volunteering non-coding assistance to a film production? Did they honestly think they had the right to require you show them copyrightable works created by other people who were not their employees? Did you truly take those creations and show them to your employer? This whole situation sounds ludicrous and should never have been required to happen by management in a company whose focus is creating software.

pfranz 10y ago
It was a large animation studio and I was a guy who monitored their render farm. So they were making content and I would write tools (Python, Perl, and Shell scripts) and did have access to their whole codebase. I told them because there was a box in my contract (I was new to the industry) and the last thing I wanted was to have my friend's short film litigated against. It's weird because I'm not sure what I'd do different. In that case I probably wouldn't tell them, but I often have side projects that might be profitable. Often I'd see artists working on short-films or publishing their own art books and they would sometimes be internal events promoting those things. I'm not sure if there was just some "understanding" I didn't quite get or if tech and art were treated separately.

deleted 10y ago

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