No topic for a side project is really “safe”, which is why I hope most laws focus on what you do for a company and not what your company might ever do. I mean,

No topic for a side project is really “safe”, which is why I hope most laws focus on what you do for a company and not what your company might ever do. I mean, imagine for instance that you simply had a band and tried to sell a few songs. And that you were an engineer. At some point in history, it would have made perfect sense to do this at Apple, with no overlap at all. Heck, I remember the ongoing lawsuits over the years from Apple Music just because of the name of Apple Computer at the time, and I think at one point they reached an agreement simply because Apple Computer was not going to be in the music business. And at the time, this seemed like a no-brainer, crazy to imagine Apple doing anything in music. And then, oops. So no, on a company-wide basis, no side project is really “safe”; companies can and do enter new lines of business, even things that seemed implausible at some point in the past.