4 ms·

You're a dev+lawyer with large company experience -- if you were writing a federal law on employee IP assignment, what would it look like?

DannyBee 10y ago
This is tough. I'm generally very pro-employee on this one. However, i've seen both sides of this. There really are crazy people, and plenty of them, who will try to use this to extract money from their employer, etc Generally, i'd say my view falls somewhere into what a small number of european countries do, and i think that would probably work well here: Employer still owns IP related to business. For the situation here (own time, etc), if you generate IP in such a situation (IE not related to business, etc), you must notify employer of that IP. Your employer has 6 months (or whatever) to buy it from you at fair market value. If they refuse to do so, it's yours. If they believe it's related to business, and you don't, well, you can fight it out in court if you want. The only downside to this system is that for large numbers of innovative employees, it generates huge overhead for the company even just to manage the process.
- awinter-py 10y ago
  From a legal standpoint I'm with the company -- if I pay someone to invent it's not unreasonable that I own what they invent. From an economics standpoint I think companies benefit from attracting innovative people. If you are hiring inventors, you want people who do it habitually and the best of those will feel uncomfortable signing away their free time. From this standpoint a company should worry about a new hire who doesn't object to a 24-hour IP assignment clause. I haven't seen hard numbers on this but I imagine that patent applications went from more individuals in ~1900 (wright brothers era) to more corporations circa 1950 (IBM transistor era). I'm sure there are many reasons for this (larger companies in the 50s, postwar employment trends, less low hanging fruit in basic research). But it would be great to see that trend reverse.

DannyBee 10y ago

This is tough. I'm generally very pro-employee on this one. However, i've seen both sides of this. There really are crazy people, and plenty of them, who will try to use this to extract money from their employer, etc Generally, i'd say my view falls somewhere into what a small number of european countries do, and i think that would probably work well here: Employer still owns IP related to business. For the situation here (own time, etc), if you generate IP in such a situation (IE not related to business, etc), you must notify employer of that IP. Your employer has 6 months (or whatever) to buy it from you at fair market value. If they refuse to do so, it's yours. If they believe it's related to business, and you don't, well, you can fight it out in court if you want. The only downside to this system is that for large numbers of innovative employees, it generates huge overhead for the company even just to manage the process.

awinter-py 10y ago
From a legal standpoint I'm with the company -- if I pay someone to invent it's not unreasonable that I own what they invent. From an economics standpoint I think companies benefit from attracting innovative people. If you are hiring inventors, you want people who do it habitually and the best of those will feel uncomfortable signing away their free time. From this standpoint a company should worry about a new hire who doesn't object to a 24-hour IP assignment clause. I haven't seen hard numbers on this but I imagine that patent applications went from more individuals in ~1900 (wright brothers era) to more corporations circa 1950 (IBM transistor era). I'm sure there are many reasons for this (larger companies in the 50s, postwar employment trends, less low hanging fruit in basic research). But it would be great to see that trend reverse.