9 ms·

> His employment agreement states that any and all intellectual property he generates while employed with us, even during weekends/free-time, is the property of

by cygned 8y ago

> His employment agreement states that any and all intellectual property he generates while employed with us, even during weekends/free-time, is the property of the company. If I had such a clause in a contract, I would turn down the opportunity. Maybe I am missing something obvious here, but I don't see the point of this. Even worse, this: > any and all intellectual property sounds to me like one couldn't do anything creative in their spare time. Even a picture painted would belong to their employer.

syshum 8y ago
Unfortunately it is a standard boilerplate in many Employment Agreements in the US. Over broad terms written by contract lawyers completely one sided. Fortunately most of the time if the employer is stupid enough to sue for non-work related IP many courts will toss the case and render the clause void in the agreement. However there have been a few bad rulings as well. I remember on case where the employer sued an employee over a book they wrote after the book was successful, the employer happened to be having financial problems... If I remember correctly the judge ruled in favor of the employer
- xkcd-sucks 8y ago
  >Unfortunately it is a standard boilerplate in many Employment Agreements in the US. Every organization says it wants to be exceptional, except where it comes to employee rights and compensation. Then it's "sorry but this is just how everyone does it", e.g. "you can't get b tyer treatment elsewhere"
- mcguire 8y ago
  Do you remember the book? Was it related to the area of employment?
  - syshum 8y ago
    I dont, it was several years ago that I read the analysis in an obscure publication, if I recall it was not related to employment, it was a work of fiction and the guy worked as a engineer or some other profession close to that
x0x0 8y ago
This is very standard outside of California. Friends have lost jobs at companies whose names you would recognize. eg M worked part-time as a sound tech in his own recording studio and his software job would mean they owned the rights to that work. M refused to sign the updated contract and ending up leaving the company over it.
- seba_dos1 8y ago
  I think you mean "in the USA outside of California". It's unthinkable for me in Poland, and I'd guess that in a greater part of Europe it's similar.
  - x0x0 8y ago
    Sorry yes, of course.
  - GuiA 8y ago
    As another commenter pointed out the situation in Germany is not significantly better; I can vouch that France also has many areas of weirdness when it comes to those matters. Companies - specifically their legal teams - are incentivized and have every reason to be greedy about what comes out of their employees' brains. I suspect it's not an insignificant factor in California being disproportionately represented when it comes to invention and innovation over the last half century or so.
- com2kid 8y ago
  Microsoft is one of the best companies in this regard. They have a very clear moonlighting policy that the tl;dr is "anything after hours, made using 100% of your own resources, is yours". That "100% your own resources" part is key, Microsoft provides a lot of free software. Employees working on their own projects have a "clean" setup that has never touched anything provided by Microsoft. Desktop/laptop, accessories, mobile phones, and so forth. Heck Microsoft has on occasion promoted apps and tools made by its employees on their own time. That other companies aren't like this confuses me. There are rules against working on products that directly complete with existing Microsoft products, for obvious reasons, but aside from that, there aren't any real constraints. (I've had plenty of friends at MS working on side projects that pulled in anywhere from hundreds to thousands a month, those projects tended to be written against MS technology stacks and made the MS Ecosystem better by their existence, why in the world wouldn't Microsoft want that to happen?)
seba_dos1 8y ago
How are such clauses even legally possible? It's ridiculous.
alain94040 8y ago
It gets even worse as you read further: IT has searched his OneDrive, laptop, etc., and we can't find a single shred of code/documentation on these ideas I'd say the company got what it deserves.
- gumby 8y ago
  Company has the right to do that pretty much anywhere assuming they own laptop, pay for onedrive etc.
  - richardwhiuk 8y ago
    Difference between what a company has the rights to do, and deliberately annoying an employee.
  - swiftcoder 8y ago
    They have the right, certainly. But as an employee of a tech firm, if I ever learned that my employer had exercised that right on me, I'd hand in my resignation the same day. Trust runs both ways, and once you blow that trust with your employee, you can't regain it.
    - majewsky 8y ago
      How would you even know that the company searched your corporate OneDrive account?
    - kerng 8y ago
      In the USA they dont have to tell you when they do, so it might have happened already and you'd never know.
    - ToFundorNot 8y ago
      If you have a forced vacation period, your employer is auditing your emails/drives/devices. It's perfectly understandable that they search your work assets regularly (and randomly) as espionage happens. They probably mentioned they would do this at some point long ago.
Tomte 8y ago
> If I had such a clause in a contract, I would turn down the opportunity. That may sound bizarrely unfair to you, but elsewhere (Germany) it's actually the law (but only for inventions/patents, not other IP). The employee has to tell the employer about any patentable idea, even if not in the general field of his employment, and even if having occurred after hours. The employer can then either claim the patent (but has to pay something), or he can release the invention (and the employee can patent it on his own).
- toomuchtodo 8y ago
  I’ve finally found a German law/regulation I take issue with.
  - Tomte 8y ago
    I need to look up sometime what happens when you have two jobs. That's uncommon here, but I'm sure the law spells it out. (Edit: couldn't find it in the law, and will not be in the University library soon to check the legal commentaries — but I still find that question interesting)
    - deleted 8y ago
      [deleted]
  - albinowax_ 8y ago
    They have a dubious law banning 'dual use' security tools too
  - geocar 8y ago
    Why? It seems pretty good to me. I did a little googling and it seems, that if you patent something that benefits your company, they can license it from you, and if they patent something you invent, then they have to pay you a revenue share. If they try and fuck you after a disclosure, then you get to keep the patent.
    - toomuchtodo 8y ago
stevebmark 8y ago
> If I had such a clause in a contract, I would turn down the opportunity. It sounds like you haven't worked in tech before? Apple is one company well known for a clause like this.
- detaro 8y ago
  It sounds you're missing out on the existence of many companies making do without such clauses if you think someone not accepting them can't be working in tech.
- cygned 8y ago
  I do work in tech, in fact I am on the employer side. Our contracts contain clauses to prevent employees from using company property in whatever they do outside work but I would never had the idea to claim their after hour inventions.
  - umanwizard 8y ago
    How do you define “after hours”? I’ve never worked at a job that had defined “work hours”.
    - cygned 8y ago
      With an on-site contract, "working hours" refers to all times on the premises of the employer (us) except for break time. For people working remotely, this is more difficult, there’s no clear definition. Eventually, I don’t see a problem there anyway, given we measure by output and prohibit engineers from reusing our stuff in their private projects. We do not employ people we don’t trust so we never had issues so far.
      - x0x0 8y ago
        Also an employer. I would generally define this as not during work hours. Work hours are flexible, but don't be stupid: just don't interleave work stuff and personal project stuff and use your own equipment and you'll be fine. ie if you take breaks from work and instead of wasting time on HN or reading news you bang out code on your personal projects, I'm not going to be enthused about that. But if you generally work 10-6 or so, and by 610 you've shut our laptop and you're coding away on your personal laptop? Great, have fun. Please don't burn out. And ditto re: trust. The way to solve not trusting your employees is to fire them and hire trustworthy ones. As a concrete example: we have had to implement a lot of data table stuff in javascript. If an employee copied that (functionality, not our code) and productized it, I wouldn't care. We'd probably even license it. I would want a discount on that license :) This generally only applies in CA, and also to companies that are heavily invested in keeping the goodwill of their employees. Personally, I don't pick fights I can't win, and having valued eng leave is definitely not a win.
userbinator 8y ago
sounds to me like one couldn't do anything creative in their spare time. Even a picture painted would belong to their employer. Fortunately it seems that most things like this are relatively unenforceable, but IMHO it's still a good idea to keep anonymity/"firewall" what is done on company time from everything else. Don't publish non-work-time material under an identity that could be traced back to your real identity with the company, for example.
- ecpottinger 8y ago
  And don`t use company resources for personal projects.
  - userbinator 8y ago
    To me that's a given, but it seems a lot of people are not too aware of that fact --- I've seen coworkers nonchalantly working on their personal blogs or email or other such things using company property, for example. It irks me, because employees doing that can dilute the argument about owning non-work IP: "why can't we own the stuff you do at home? You're already doing personal stuff at work."
smnrchrds 8y ago
> Even a picture painted would belong to their employer. Taken at face value, it's much worse than that. All the family photos he has taken, that novel on the back of his mind he wanted to write, that poem he wrote for his wife's birthday, the all belong to the company now. If he made a personal sex tape for his and his wife's enjoyment, the company can request it and sell it online or upload it to PornHub at their sole discretion. There is no way in hell I would ever sign such a clause, unless there is literally life and death on the line.
- harlanji 8y ago
  All coding job offers in California that I’ve received have come with an appendix which invalidates such clauses. It’s a major reason to work in Cali, if I understand correctly. In practice, if I’m working for my salary then I don’t have energy to innovate on my own, beyond conference talk demos that take a few weekends max.
  - ralph84 8y ago
    This, along with non-competes being unenforceable, is why California will always have the most tech startups.
  - pmiller2 8y ago
    That’s because it’s against the law in California for a company to claim unrelated IP done on off hours with personal equipment. Don’t think they wouldn’t try it if they could.
- throwaway5r09 8y ago
  This made me chuckle. I’ve made a few sexy videos with my wife and just thought of my manager saying, “Welp, that’s ours now.”
  - faissaloo 8y ago
    That sounds very prone to abuse...
jwalton 8y ago
In Canada, you wouldn't be able to work as a software engineer without signing a contract with such a clause. Investors like these clauses because they don't want some employee saying "Well, this part of the product I wrote in my evenings, so now that you're selling the company, I'm claiming ownership of it." It can be messy. That said, most companies I've worked for here put that in your contract, but then are more than happy to give you written permission to release rights to (for example) open source projects, or things not related to the business. I worked very briefly for one company which literally tried to assert ownership of photographs we took in our spare time while we worked for them (I won't name them, as they're a little over-litigous). I did not work there for long.
- ineedasername 8y ago
  Just nod if it rhymes with boracle
- ecpottinger 8y ago
  In Canada I worked as a computer technician. I often had to design my own circuits and wiring to solve problems. The company I worked for owned all my hardware designs. However, if it was not hardware it was mine. About three years after the company grew I had to sign a contract - the contract clear said they owned all my designs. I crossed that out, wrote in a clause they only got hardware designs made in shop, signed and date it, THEN had the president (small company still) also sign and date the changes. Even if legally challenged, I could prove in court I was acting honestly and the expections of the signed contract.
- hexo 8y ago
  this company behavior should be extremely illegal. noone can tell you you cant program FOSS in your own time(!!! such as they cant prohibit you from drinking beer on friday night with friends). and claiming stuff such as "Well, this part of the product I wrote in my evenings, so now that you're selling the company, I'm claiming ownership of it." should be equally easy to dismiss by judge as 'crap argument'.
  - c2h5oh 8y ago
gumby 8y ago
In some states like Texas this is in fact the case. Worse, your knowledge can be used to keep you from working in the same field because the stuff in your head is deemed property of your employer. I believe the crucial case was Conley v. DSC Communications Corp
jopsen 8y ago
Usually, it just means that you ask your employer for an exception of you're doing something in your spare time. Few employers will want to claim ownership of your mobile game/app or whatever, unless it's related to the company or what it does.
- NullPrefix 8y ago
  You're supposed to ask your employer if you're allowed to share that dick pick?
  - jopsen 8y ago
    Only if you tattoo source code on your..... I personally prefer to keep my code private by other means. But no judgement, hehe :)
    - NullPrefix 8y ago
      You don't need source code for that. Photos are copyrighted by default, so it's IP. Some companies demand all IP created in spare time.
      - jopsen 8y ago
        It's very unlikely that IP not related to software will be ruled to fall under the contract if challenged. But, hey I'm no lawyer..
jeremysalwen 8y ago
As many others have mentioned, there is an exception in California for things done using no company time and resources, and unrelated to your work or the company's area of business or "future anticipated research". This exception required by California law is often copied verbatim into employment agreements, even if you are working outside of california. However, the last clause of this term essentially de-fangs the term entirely if you work at any medium sized company. I have worked at two FANG companies, and in both cases I crossed off this clause from the contract and initialed the line before I signed it. I told them that I couldn't sign that line and what I did, and in both cases, they said they would "get back to me" with what legal said. In both cases it never came up again, and I started working having signed only the modified contract. I think that's a fair comprise of who owns what, and I would suggest anyone else to do the same thing I did.
- zachr 8y ago
  Has an employment lawyer vetted this approach? I suspect that's not really effective...
  - benj111 8y ago
    What, signing a modified contract? Both parties are free to negotiate.
  - kerng 8y ago
    One of my employers even had a process in place where you submit things you do off work or plan todo and you can officially get these approved before signing, like running a side business, etc. Its a contract, so its negotiable. HR likes to create the impression it's a static document, but it's not. Future employees have a lot of underleveraged negotiation powers, especially at large companies I think.
  - gizmo686 8y ago
    What approach? Negotiating a contract before signing it. The only potential problem I see is that is that he didn't say that he had a representative from the company also initial the modification, and doesn't necessarily have a paper trail documenting that he informed them of the modification.
amluto 8y ago
AIUI, this is mostly unenforceable in CA.
sjapkee 8y ago
> His employment agreement states that any and all intellectual property he generates while employed with us, even during weekends/free-time, is the property of the company. > even during weekends/free-time It sounds illegal. In the US, you can really specify such clause in the contract?
heelix 8y ago
I worked for a company that required me to tell them about all personal software developed for a period after I left the company. I suspect the intent was to make sure I did not create competing software... but the terms were clear and had a small reimbursement for filling it out and sending copies. They got a bunch of custom ADND software for Windows CE. At some point, I got a phone call asking why I was sending them this stuff. It apparently irritated someone enough they released me from those terms.
throwawaypatent 8y ago
This is a great way to demotivate programmers from self-learning and side projects. Programming used to be my hobby and I was always creating webapps or whatnot. Whatever I learned during off-hours, it improved my productivity at work. Since starting work at this new company, I have lost all the zeal for programming on the side. It feels unfair. Not that my little apps will ever make enough money to get noticed at work. However, there is always a little voice in my head which keep saying don't spend too much time on this project, you don't own it. Looking to get out as soon as possible.

by cygned 8y ago

syshum 8y ago

Unfortunately it is a standard boilerplate in many Employment Agreements in the US. Over broad terms written by contract lawyers completely one sided. Fortunately most of the time if the employer is stupid enough to sue for non-work related IP many courts will toss the case and render the clause void in the agreement. However there have been a few bad rulings as well. I remember on case where the employer sued an employee over a book they wrote after the book was successful, the employer happened to be having financial problems... If I remember correctly the judge ruled in favor of the employer

xkcd-sucks 8y ago
>Unfortunately it is a standard boilerplate in many Employment Agreements in the US. Every organization says it wants to be exceptional, except where it comes to employee rights and compensation. Then it's "sorry but this is just how everyone does it", e.g. "you can't get b tyer treatment elsewhere"
mcguire 8y ago
Do you remember the book? Was it related to the area of employment?
- syshum 8y ago
  I dont, it was several years ago that I read the analysis in an obscure publication, if I recall it was not related to employment, it was a work of fiction and the guy worked as a engineer or some other profession close to that

x0x0 8y ago

This is very standard outside of California. Friends have lost jobs at companies whose names you would recognize. eg M worked part-time as a sound tech in his own recording studio and his software job would mean they owned the rights to that work. M refused to sign the updated contract and ending up leaving the company over it.

seba_dos1 8y ago
I think you mean "in the USA outside of California". It's unthinkable for me in Poland, and I'd guess that in a greater part of Europe it's similar.
- x0x0 8y ago
  Sorry yes, of course.
- GuiA 8y ago
  As another commenter pointed out the situation in Germany is not significantly better; I can vouch that France also has many areas of weirdness when it comes to those matters. Companies - specifically their legal teams - are incentivized and have every reason to be greedy about what comes out of their employees' brains. I suspect it's not an insignificant factor in California being disproportionately represented when it comes to invention and innovation over the last half century or so.
com2kid 8y ago
Microsoft is one of the best companies in this regard. They have a very clear moonlighting policy that the tl;dr is "anything after hours, made using 100% of your own resources, is yours". That "100% your own resources" part is key, Microsoft provides a lot of free software. Employees working on their own projects have a "clean" setup that has never touched anything provided by Microsoft. Desktop/laptop, accessories, mobile phones, and so forth. Heck Microsoft has on occasion promoted apps and tools made by its employees on their own time. That other companies aren't like this confuses me. There are rules against working on products that directly complete with existing Microsoft products, for obvious reasons, but aside from that, there aren't any real constraints. (I've had plenty of friends at MS working on side projects that pulled in anywhere from hundreds to thousands a month, those projects tended to be written against MS technology stacks and made the MS Ecosystem better by their existence, why in the world wouldn't Microsoft want that to happen?)

seba_dos1 8y ago

How are such clauses even legally possible? It's ridiculous.

alain94040 8y ago

It gets even worse as you read further: IT has searched his OneDrive, laptop, etc., and we can't find a single shred of code/documentation on these ideas I'd say the company got what it deserves.

gumby 8y ago
Company has the right to do that pretty much anywhere assuming they own laptop, pay for onedrive etc.
- richardwhiuk 8y ago
  Difference between what a company has the rights to do, and deliberately annoying an employee.
- swiftcoder 8y ago
  They have the right, certainly. But as an employee of a tech firm, if I ever learned that my employer had exercised that right on me, I'd hand in my resignation the same day. Trust runs both ways, and once you blow that trust with your employee, you can't regain it.
  - majewsky 8y ago
    How would you even know that the company searched your corporate OneDrive account?
  - kerng 8y ago
    In the USA they dont have to tell you when they do, so it might have happened already and you'd never know.
  - ToFundorNot 8y ago
    If you have a forced vacation period, your employer is auditing your emails/drives/devices. It's perfectly understandable that they search your work assets regularly (and randomly) as espionage happens. They probably mentioned they would do this at some point long ago.

Tomte 8y ago

> If I had such a clause in a contract, I would turn down the opportunity. That may sound bizarrely unfair to you, but elsewhere (Germany) it's actually the law (but only for inventions/patents, not other IP). The employee has to tell the employer about any patentable idea, even if not in the general field of his employment, and even if having occurred after hours. The employer can then either claim the patent (but has to pay something), or he can release the invention (and the employee can patent it on his own).

toomuchtodo 8y ago
I’ve finally found a German law/regulation I take issue with.
- Tomte 8y ago
  I need to look up sometime what happens when you have two jobs. That's uncommon here, but I'm sure the law spells it out. (Edit: couldn't find it in the law, and will not be in the University library soon to check the legal commentaries — but I still find that question interesting)
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
- albinowax_ 8y ago
  They have a dubious law banning 'dual use' security tools too
- geocar 8y ago
  Why? It seems pretty good to me. I did a little googling and it seems, that if you patent something that benefits your company, they can license it from you, and if they patent something you invent, then they have to pay you a revenue share. If they try and fuck you after a disclosure, then you get to keep the patent.
  - toomuchtodo 8y ago

stevebmark 8y ago

> If I had such a clause in a contract, I would turn down the opportunity. It sounds like you haven't worked in tech before? Apple is one company well known for a clause like this.

detaro 8y ago
It sounds you're missing out on the existence of many companies making do without such clauses if you think someone not accepting them can't be working in tech.
cygned 8y ago
I do work in tech, in fact I am on the employer side. Our contracts contain clauses to prevent employees from using company property in whatever they do outside work but I would never had the idea to claim their after hour inventions.
- umanwizard 8y ago
  How do you define “after hours”? I’ve never worked at a job that had defined “work hours”.
  - cygned 8y ago
    With an on-site contract, "working hours" refers to all times on the premises of the employer (us) except for break time. For people working remotely, this is more difficult, there’s no clear definition. Eventually, I don’t see a problem there anyway, given we measure by output and prohibit engineers from reusing our stuff in their private projects. We do not employ people we don’t trust so we never had issues so far.
    - x0x0 8y ago
      Also an employer. I would generally define this as not during work hours. Work hours are flexible, but don't be stupid: just don't interleave work stuff and personal project stuff and use your own equipment and you'll be fine. ie if you take breaks from work and instead of wasting time on HN or reading news you bang out code on your personal projects, I'm not going to be enthused about that. But if you generally work 10-6 or so, and by 610 you've shut our laptop and you're coding away on your personal laptop? Great, have fun. Please don't burn out. And ditto re: trust. The way to solve not trusting your employees is to fire them and hire trustworthy ones. As a concrete example: we have had to implement a lot of data table stuff in javascript. If an employee copied that (functionality, not our code) and productized it, I wouldn't care. We'd probably even license it. I would want a discount on that license :) This generally only applies in CA, and also to companies that are heavily invested in keeping the goodwill of their employees. Personally, I don't pick fights I can't win, and having valued eng leave is definitely not a win.

userbinator 8y ago

sounds to me like one couldn't do anything creative in their spare time. Even a picture painted would belong to their employer. Fortunately it seems that most things like this are relatively unenforceable, but IMHO it's still a good idea to keep anonymity/"firewall" what is done on company time from everything else. Don't publish non-work-time material under an identity that could be traced back to your real identity with the company, for example.

ecpottinger 8y ago
And don`t use company resources for personal projects.
- userbinator 8y ago
  To me that's a given, but it seems a lot of people are not too aware of that fact --- I've seen coworkers nonchalantly working on their personal blogs or email or other such things using company property, for example. It irks me, because employees doing that can dilute the argument about owning non-work IP: "why can't we own the stuff you do at home? You're already doing personal stuff at work."

smnrchrds 8y ago

> Even a picture painted would belong to their employer. Taken at face value, it's much worse than that. All the family photos he has taken, that novel on the back of his mind he wanted to write, that poem he wrote for his wife's birthday, the all belong to the company now. If he made a personal sex tape for his and his wife's enjoyment, the company can request it and sell it online or upload it to PornHub at their sole discretion. There is no way in hell I would ever sign such a clause, unless there is literally life and death on the line.

harlanji 8y ago
All coding job offers in California that I’ve received have come with an appendix which invalidates such clauses. It’s a major reason to work in Cali, if I understand correctly. In practice, if I’m working for my salary then I don’t have energy to innovate on my own, beyond conference talk demos that take a few weekends max.
- ralph84 8y ago
  This, along with non-competes being unenforceable, is why California will always have the most tech startups.
- pmiller2 8y ago
  That’s because it’s against the law in California for a company to claim unrelated IP done on off hours with personal equipment. Don’t think they wouldn’t try it if they could.
throwaway5r09 8y ago
This made me chuckle. I’ve made a few sexy videos with my wife and just thought of my manager saying, “Welp, that’s ours now.”
- faissaloo 8y ago
  That sounds very prone to abuse...

jwalton 8y ago

In Canada, you wouldn't be able to work as a software engineer without signing a contract with such a clause. Investors like these clauses because they don't want some employee saying "Well, this part of the product I wrote in my evenings, so now that you're selling the company, I'm claiming ownership of it." It can be messy. That said, most companies I've worked for here put that in your contract, but then are more than happy to give you written permission to release rights to (for example) open source projects, or things not related to the business. I worked very briefly for one company which literally tried to assert ownership of photographs we took in our spare time while we worked for them (I won't name them, as they're a little over-litigous). I did not work there for long.

ineedasername 8y ago
Just nod if it rhymes with boracle
ecpottinger 8y ago
In Canada I worked as a computer technician. I often had to design my own circuits and wiring to solve problems. The company I worked for owned all my hardware designs. However, if it was not hardware it was mine. About three years after the company grew I had to sign a contract - the contract clear said they owned all my designs. I crossed that out, wrote in a clause they only got hardware designs made in shop, signed and date it, THEN had the president (small company still) also sign and date the changes. Even if legally challenged, I could prove in court I was acting honestly and the expections of the signed contract.
hexo 8y ago
this company behavior should be extremely illegal. noone can tell you you cant program FOSS in your own time(!!! such as they cant prohibit you from drinking beer on friday night with friends). and claiming stuff such as "Well, this part of the product I wrote in my evenings, so now that you're selling the company, I'm claiming ownership of it." should be equally easy to dismiss by judge as 'crap argument'.
- c2h5oh 8y ago

gumby 8y ago

In some states like Texas this is in fact the case. Worse, your knowledge can be used to keep you from working in the same field because the stuff in your head is deemed property of your employer. I believe the crucial case was Conley v. DSC Communications Corp

jopsen 8y ago

Usually, it just means that you ask your employer for an exception of you're doing something in your spare time. Few employers will want to claim ownership of your mobile game/app or whatever, unless it's related to the company or what it does.

NullPrefix 8y ago
You're supposed to ask your employer if you're allowed to share that dick pick?
- jopsen 8y ago
  Only if you tattoo source code on your..... I personally prefer to keep my code private by other means. But no judgement, hehe :)
  - NullPrefix 8y ago
    You don't need source code for that. Photos are copyrighted by default, so it's IP. Some companies demand all IP created in spare time.
    - jopsen 8y ago
      It's very unlikely that IP not related to software will be ruled to fall under the contract if challenged. But, hey I'm no lawyer..

jeremysalwen 8y ago

As many others have mentioned, there is an exception in California for things done using no company time and resources, and unrelated to your work or the company's area of business or "future anticipated research". This exception required by California law is often copied verbatim into employment agreements, even if you are working outside of california. However, the last clause of this term essentially de-fangs the term entirely if you work at any medium sized company. I have worked at two FANG companies, and in both cases I crossed off this clause from the contract and initialed the line before I signed it. I told them that I couldn't sign that line and what I did, and in both cases, they said they would "get back to me" with what legal said. In both cases it never came up again, and I started working having signed only the modified contract. I think that's a fair comprise of who owns what, and I would suggest anyone else to do the same thing I did.

zachr 8y ago
Has an employment lawyer vetted this approach? I suspect that's not really effective...
- benj111 8y ago
  What, signing a modified contract? Both parties are free to negotiate.
- kerng 8y ago
  One of my employers even had a process in place where you submit things you do off work or plan todo and you can officially get these approved before signing, like running a side business, etc. Its a contract, so its negotiable. HR likes to create the impression it's a static document, but it's not. Future employees have a lot of underleveraged negotiation powers, especially at large companies I think.
- gizmo686 8y ago
  What approach? Negotiating a contract before signing it. The only potential problem I see is that is that he didn't say that he had a representative from the company also initial the modification, and doesn't necessarily have a paper trail documenting that he informed them of the modification.

amluto 8y ago

AIUI, this is mostly unenforceable in CA.

sjapkee 8y ago

> His employment agreement states that any and all intellectual property he generates while employed with us, even during weekends/free-time, is the property of the company. > even during weekends/free-time It sounds illegal. In the US, you can really specify such clause in the contract?

heelix 8y ago

I worked for a company that required me to tell them about all personal software developed for a period after I left the company. I suspect the intent was to make sure I did not create competing software... but the terms were clear and had a small reimbursement for filling it out and sending copies. They got a bunch of custom ADND software for Windows CE. At some point, I got a phone call asking why I was sending them this stuff. It apparently irritated someone enough they released me from those terms.

throwawaypatent 8y ago

This is a great way to demotivate programmers from self-learning and side projects. Programming used to be my hobby and I was always creating webapps or whatnot. Whatever I learned during off-hours, it improved my productivity at work. Since starting work at this new company, I have lost all the zeal for programming on the side. It feels unfair. Not that my little apps will ever make enough money to get noticed at work. However, there is always a little voice in my head which keep saying don't spend too much time on this project, you don't own it. Looking to get out as soon as possible.