3 ms·
"Your game designer works for a year and invents 7 games. At the end of the year, she sues you, claiming that she owns 4 of them, because those particular games
by crdoconnor 9y ago
"Your game designer works for a year and invents 7 games. At the end of the year, she sues you, claiming that she owns 4 of them, because those particular games were invented between 5pm and 9am, when she wasn’t on duty."
She wasn't paid for ideas, she was paid for intellectual property: code.
"hey listen, I know that inventing happens all the time, and it’s impossible to prove whether you invented something while you were sitting in the chair I supplied in the cubicle I supplied or not."
You don't need to prove whether something was invented while sitting on the chair. There's a pretty simple explicit transferral of intellectual property - you pushed it to the company github.
"that ONE GUY from 1998 who didn’t sign the agreement is going to be a real jerk about signing it now, because he knows that he’s personally holding up a $350,000,000 acquisition and he can demand a lot of money to sign."
Which happened when, exactly?
- sokoloff 9y agoI've been involved in two diligence exercises (on the buy side), where not having IP assignment was an issue for the selling company. I wasn't close enough on the selling side to figure out what concessions they needed to make to make the problem go away, but it absolutely can and does hold up acquisitions.
- crdoconnor 9y ago"not having IP assignment" Was this specifically about a clause in an employees contract that allowed for side projects? Or was it, say, about a software license purchased from another company? (which probably does happen, yes)
- sokoloff 9y agoIt's been a few years, but as I recall, both were early figures (unclear if employees or contractors) that had no signed IP assignment contract on file.