When we have downtime at work, I'm working on side projects. I would hope the company would prefer me working on something than sitting there twittling my thumb

When we have downtime at work, I'm working on side projects. I would hope the company would prefer me working on something than sitting there twittling my thumbs. Any thing I work on is only improving my knowledge for the company itself. I don't think they have any policy that it is theirs. Though most of my work is kept on the Internet and very rarely do I ever have the files I am working on on the computer, and if they are, they are just mock files that have no purpose other than UI. I have heard of plenty of companies claiming to own your ideas, but unless you directly stole something from your company, like their core code -- in which case, a lot of Google's stuff is open source anyway, so really, how can they claim to own your projects? And if thats the case, than what share of your own idea do you get? Anyways, unless the company wants to help you market and advertise and sell your product, than they really have no say. But companies will do as they please. They are certainly better off allowing people to be creative. There are plenty of projects I work on that I'm sure my company has no interest in. Would they want to claim something I wrote that encourages swearing and cursing? Yeah.. probably not.