8 ms·

"Google asserts copyright, even on work I do in my own time." (Snap framework)

128 points by tianyicui 16y ago

tptacek 16y ago
Not a weird Google thing. Very typical IP contract term.
- natrius 16y ago
  Is it? Doesn't that mean that you can't do any other work for anyone (e.g. contracting, startups, side jobs) while you're working there? That seems wrong.
  - aaronblohowiak 16y ago
    It may not be enforceable in California
    - tptacek 16y ago
      California does have moonlighting protection laws, which would prevent you from dealing with adverse effects simply for working on a side project.
- pingswept 16y ago
  It might be typical amongst large companies, but it's more extreme than the three IP agreements I've signed, and several others that I've heard of. It would take a very extreme incentive to make me sign an agreement that took all the output of my mind.
  - tptacek 16y ago
    What are the agreements you've signed? The boilerplate agreement I've seen, over and over, take anything related in any way to the company's business no matter when you build it, modulo a list of specific things you enumerate before taking the job.
    - jellicle 16y ago
      That sounds like an agreement you should not sign, then.
    - pingswept 16y ago
      The agreements I've signed have been part of the contracts at the 3 engineering/design firms I've worked at: mindtribe.com, ideo.com, and greenmountainengineering.com. (I've also worked a few other places, but they were schools and an environmental foundation.) Actually, now that I think of it, the most aggressive agreement I've signed was when I was working as a researcher at a university robotics lab. In all cases, the agreements had the list of exceptions you mentioned, but they only took ownership of stuff I thought of while I was on the clock. At the last company I worked for, the agreement was very contentious-- the employees lobbied for, and eventually received, an agreement that allowed them to own not only their off-the-clock ideas, but also their on-the-clock ideas if the company didn't develop them within 6 months. (There were more details, but that's the rough idea.) At the time, I thought this was a big deal. In retrospect, I think all that stuff is just people making stuff up about what is going to happen in an imaginary future where ideas are worth millions and lawyers are free. All the same, I still refuse to sign agreements like that-- I think it distorts the way innovation actually works. As it's said, we're all standing on the shoulders of giants; I don't want to be under the control of someone who doesn't understand that.
lrm242 16y ago
The boundaries between what's yours and what's the companies is usually outlined by: a) Did you do it on the company's time? b) Did you use company equipment or resources to do it? c) Does it pertain to the company's current or future business? Item (c) is where the legal gray area shows up. It gives you enough leeway to innovate on your own time with your own stuff but it also gives the company the legal right to assert themselves if they feel you've strayed to close to "company matters". (c) is important because your employer can not control what's in your head. If you work for a company that builds cars, they don't want you thinking of a new, innovative way to build a car on your own time, leaving, patenting it, and then competing with them. This is entirely reasonable for both parties, IMO. In this particular case it looks like the author has build a web server. This clearly falls within the realm of what Google might consider their current or future business and therefore can reasonably believe that the author is using Google knowledge (even if not equipment, resourecs, or time) to build it. EDIT: Clearly every IP agreement is different; however, every one I've ever read or signed has essentially been the above. Further, there is always a schedule allowing you to outline the IP you currently own that might violate (c).
- bphogan 16y ago
  The problem with this line of thinking is that he's not doing it on company time and thus not being compensated for it. This guy built a web server on his own time, and now Google gets to add it to their portfolio and is not compensating him for his work. So the message is basically "We own your mind, and everything you make, and you have no choice. And we don't need to pay you because, hey, you're lucky you've got a job with us."
  - enjo 16y ago
    The argument from the companies perspective: They hire you not as a implementor but as an inventor. In exchange for a salary they have hired you to provide the full value of your experience and imagination to the company. This extends beyond 'working hours' (after all, you're on salary). It is simply a way of ensuring that the companies gets it maximum value for what you invent while being compensated by them.
AndyKelley 16y ago
I just joined Amazon.com, and they explicitly state that they do NOT own work done on my own time, unless that work is in direct competition with Amazon itself: "During the course of employment and at the termination thereof, the Employee shall promptly disclose and deliver over to the Company, without additional compensation, to the extent that such disclosure could reasonably be expected to be of interest to the Company, in writing, or in such form and manner as the Company may reasonably require, the following: ... any and all algorithms, procedures or techniques related to the Company's business activities or to the Employee's work with the Company, and the essential ideas and principles underlying such algorithms, procedures or techniques, conceived, originated, adapted, discovered, developed, acquired, evaluated, tested, or applied by the Employee while employed by the Company, whether or not such algorithms, procedures or techniques are embodied in a computer program...However, the Company recognizes that the Employee may Conceive and/or Originate certain Products and/or Services which are unrelated to the activities of the Company, unrelated to the planned activities of the Company, and unrelated to any reasonable extension of the activities or planned activities of the Company ("Unrelated Products and/or Services"). The parties therefore agree, the other provisions of this Section 1 notwithstanding, that...any Unrelated Products and/or Services Conceived and/or Originated by the Employee, even while employed by the Company, shall not be considered Disclosure information..."
- amock 16y ago
  The problem with this is that Amazon has so many businesses that almost anything you do could be related the to company's business activities.
  - writetoalok 16y ago
    ditto Google.
  - Silhouette 16y ago
    This is the problem with any generalised "anything you do that might one day compete with the company" criterion. Even if an employer only claims work that an employee does on their own time that relates to any current company activities, there is still the need for an employee to know about the other project, which is hardly likely in a huge company with 100,000s of staff worldwide. I think the standard should be that things the employee does that are directly related to their own employment are what is covered. It's fair enough for an employer to claim ideas directly related to the project you're being paid to work on, and/or to say that you can't compete in closely related fields to what you're doing for your employer. However, that's a very different thing to counting effectively the entire world of software development, if anything that any part of a large software company does or ever might do could be claimed.
eplanit 16y ago
I worked for IBM years ago. I remember signing their IP contract on the day I started work, while my manager explained to me "it doesn't matter if you're vacationing on the moon -- if you invent something while there, it's ours".
- iWhatever 16y ago
  Yes, on your first day at IBM you were given the opportunity to declare IP that you owned. Anything else going forward belonged to Big Blue.
  - markchristian 16y ago
    Not true in California -- they can only assert copyright claims on anything you build using company-owned property. So, if you did it your own time, on your own hardware, you can actually fight back against this.
    - dhimes 16y ago
      Such was also true in the 1980s (I was advised- never tested it in court). Whether a signed agreement was enforceable was pretty much a state issue, but it was generally thought that they were hard to enforce (like non-compete agreements).
bphogan 16y ago
This concept irritates me. You basically can't create things on your own if you work for a company? I just completely disagree with these kind of no-compete things. That said, I also think it's silly to sign a contract that states this as a condition of employment. I've walked away from a couple of consulting opportunities in the past because of contracts like this, but gotten a few others because I just politely asked if they would strike out that part of the contract. I understand wanting to protect your own intellectual property, but I think it's sleazy to claim ownership of things people do on their own time. It's right up there with "no competing with us for 2 years after we fire you" clauses.
- llimllib 16y ago
  My boss crossed off that section of his contract when he worked for Booz Allen, and nobody made a peep.
  - foobarbazoo 16y ago
    I negotiated my contract with Apple; it had to go through legal and get VP-level approval, but the changes were approved. I doubt everyone can do this, though.
    - gms 16y ago
      re: your last sentence, what made your situation special?
    - bphogan 16y ago
      The lesson though is that the answer is always no unless you ask.
    - alexqgb 16y ago
      This suggests that a lot of this stuff is boilerplate. Often, it gets added to contracts because there's no cost in doing so (except to the laywer's client). At the same time, it's not necessarily part of a broader strategy to which the company is firmly, if quietly committed, and which they'll stick to, even as the costs of doing so escalate. If the baseline cost of finding and hiring the right people is at all significant, economizing by lowering resistance is a no-brainer. Just treat this stuff like default settings from a useful, if not totally UX-savvy provider of software, and don't raise any eyebrows unless you get unexpected and seemingly arbitrary or mindless pushback.
protomyth 16y ago
I do wonder how many open source / free software projects have code contributed to them that is actually owned by Google (or some other corporation) and will it come back to bite anyone?
- cdibona 16y ago
  See above. Since we clear employees for open source work, we can generally say that Google contributions into opens source are reviewed and okay.
  - protomyth 16y ago
    Yeah, but this points to someone who didn't get clearance so I wonder if it is a unique case. Also, I am actually thinking of some other companies. Thinking about it further, some projects want copyright assignment, so one wonders if some of those weren't done properly.
    - cdibona 16y ago
      Actually, he did get clearance, that's not immediately apparant from his thread, but he was granted permission to release code into the Snap Framework under Google's copyright and an open source license.
mtviewdave 16y ago
In the state of California, Google does not have an absolute right to ownership on all work done in your spare time. From California Labor Code Section 2870: http://www.leginfo.ca.gov/cgi-bin/displaycode?section=lab&group=02001-03000&file=2870-2872 http://www.leginfo.ca.gov/cgi-bin/displaycode?section=lab&#3... They can claim ownership if the work was done with the company's property, or the work is related to the company's business. And courts in California have generally held that the relation has to be pretty strong. So a software company can't claim ownership on _all_ software products you create in your spare time, just that which is "substantially similar" to what the company does. There was a Joel on Software discussion on this a while back: http://discuss.joelonsoftware.com/default.asp?biz.5.451795.20 http://discuss.joelonsoftware.com/default.asp?biz.5.451795.2... EDIT: The above is not legal advice. Corporate and worker rights vary by country, and the U.S., by state. But I hope the above is informative to Google engineers who work in California.
- how_gauche 16y ago
  I don't work in California.
- tianyicui 16y ago
  According to the author's blog: "Gregory David Collins is a Canadian software engineer living in Zürich, Switzerland."
dstein 16y ago
I've seen this type of situation blow up pretty badly. Coworker started a side-project, quit company, side-project becomes really successful, and the company sued the ex-employee. Legally the situation was perhaps iffy (they ended up settling out of court), but it left a bad enough impression on me that I ended up leaving the company soon after, on moral grounds. I just could not work for a company that thinks they own my brain, and I will never do so again.
- cdibona 16y ago
  So this is really the only proper response. If you work for a company in the US or in Europe, they have claim to your creativity and work. If you don't like it, work for yourself. (see my post above for how we deal with it at Google)
  - jrockway 16y ago
    They have a claim that they can waive. Everywhere I've worked except Doubleclick (bought by Google, incidentally), has done this.
  - cookiecaper 16y ago
    Why do they have a claim on your general creativity? My understanding of employment is that the employer is renting my services for the tasks they want done. They say, "Hello, will you please implement these features in our system today?", and I say, "Sure." A permanent employment agreement simply means this will continue upon a regular pay schedule and compensation package for the indefinite future. It may also come with stipulations like "We'd like to hang out in our office most of the time so you can help us on-demand", or whatever, but all of those things are settled and worked out collaboratively before the candidate becomes an employee. Why does it mean they "have claim on my creativity and work" outside of this scope? I may sign additional non-compete agreements that make it so that I can't engage in any threatening or similar business. I may sign non-disclosure agreements that make it so I can't use any proprietary or secret information that belongs to the company. However, why should I sign an agreement that allows the company to take things they've had nothing to do with without any pay? Does the employee have power to take from the employer without providing compensation? Why should the employer have that power?
cdibona 16y ago
So, under California law, which is probably the most liberal in the United States coving IP, you are prescribed from competing with your employer even on your own time or on your own equipment. This is reinforced in industry employment agreements, including Google's (my employer) Most employers take the position that everything you do in the space is logically competitive. Recognizing that, we, Google, make it very easy to get permission to open source things, but under Google copyright. We have a process for releasing under your own copyright, but it is not as flexible. That said, we've cleared about 200 (75% of those requested) projects in the last year for copyright release. It's easy to get knee-jerk about this and get upset, but recognizing the nature of IP in a company and acting on it is infinitely better than pretending the problem doesn't exist and then, in the future, retroactively claiming copyright when convenient. The latter leads to lawsuits and unfair restraints on creativity and competition. This system works. We've released 10s of millions of lines of code into thousands of open source projects. It protects the employees and it protects Google and the price is a bit of complexity and the odd thread like this. Also, thanks to this system, Googlers can work on Google equipment and during their 20% on these kinds of projects, which is clearly useful and recognizes that people who work on open source almost universally do so without regard to the machinery or network they use.
- cookiecaper 16y ago
  Don't you think that this system is at least a little bit unfair? Why does Google automatically get claim on work that has no relation to Google, done without compensation from Google, and without any of Google's equipment or facilities? How come these people need Google permission to assert a claim on their own intellectual property that is entirely distinct from anything involving Google? It sounds like this was established simply so that Google can claim things that they have no real right to claim and misappropriate an employee's work as convenient. How come you can't just say "All work on Google-owned software is copyright Google. All work directly assigned by Google management is copyright Google. All work performed wholly independently and separate from Google by Google employees is copyright its respective owners."? I don't get it.
  - cdibona 16y ago
MoreMoschops 16y ago
Am I the only person who thinks he wasn't being serious, and is now just seeing how long he can keep a straight face?
bhickey 16y ago
My employer is sensible about this issue. Everyone files an IP declaration enumerating the projects that are or may become relevant to the company's business. Since this determination is made at their sole discretion, I threw the kitchen sink at it and wrote down everything. From the date of that declaration, they have a 90 day period in which they have an exclusive option to negotiate to buy. I am obliged to negotiate in good faith, but I am not obliged to sell. After that window, the option goes up in smoke.
- dhimes 16y ago
  I'm impressed by that. I've never heard of such freedom, but it strikes me that since so many people are considering startups now that such an agreement may be a competitive advantage by which companies can compete for employees. If I'm reading you right you make this declaration when you are hired. What happens if you start a project while you are (already) at the company?
  - bhickey 16y ago
    I've only been here for a month, and the policy has already been revised since I arrived! The 90-day timeout is new. I'm happy with it. If I got a new idea project idea that wasn't tied to alpha capture systems, I don't think there would be any issue with amending my declaration. Before my time, there was an expansive policy that asserted ownership over everything. The old policy might not have even been enforceable in the UK. Some employees raised concerns about it, management responded. The company is small (~60 employees/~25 devs), so there tends to be a lot of flexibility.
bugsy 16y ago
For this comment, let's assume that Google is correct that it owns copyright on all code he writes, even in his free time and not pertaining to his work at Google. Now, that presumed, when an author contributes to the project, they explicitly agree to license their contributions under to the project's BSD license. However, Google owns this code being contributed, and yet they, as a corporate entity, have not consented to the licensing of their contributions being distributed under the BSD license. Until they do, in writing, signed by the corporate legal counsel, or whoever else is able to sign contracts on their behalf, the code contributed is not BSD licensed because the author, which is Google Inc, did not agree to it in writing, and thus distribution and use is now a violation of Google's copyright since they did not legally consent to have their code released. As the owner of the code, Google alone can consent to its use, and not the "code slave resource" who happened to produce it, whose very soul Google now contractually owns. This could be a problem for the project. In general, projects need to require that anyone contributing new code represent that they alone are the owners of the copyright to the new code being contributed. If you contribute code owned by someone else and not explicitly licensed in a compatible manner by that other entity, then you have code in the project that presents a serious legal liability.
- cdibona 16y ago
  But in this case, we released the code , under Google Copyright, into a BSD project and under a BSD license.
  - bugsy 16y ago
    It's not clear who is 'we'? Do you (plural) have the legal right to sign contracts and take out bank loans on Google's behalf? If so, yes, you represent Google legally as the official legal representative and this is all cool. The code should just have a link to the signed document placing the code under BSD.
    - cdibona 16y ago
      So contracts and bank loans take a higher strata of employees to approve, but I've been given authority on open source matters. It's not practical to have a signed document on file with every project, but we do have such documents on file with the FSF, Apache and many other projects. It's not always practical to do these docs, but they are out there. This is one of the great things about open source, through the use of real , trusted open source licenses, we state our corporate intention quite clearly, and then we don't need to have a huge load of paper that accompanies every project. We don't , for instance, have paperwork clearing the ip on all the projects we use at Google. The linux kernel alone is a huge work of shared copyright. No paper....
comice 16y ago
What else of Google's employees stuff do Google get to own? If they get into debt, does Google share that too?
- runningdogx 16y ago
  And, as johnl asked in the github thread, does Google hold copyright on Chris's comments here on HN? Code, comments... they're both speech. If you can sign away code copyright in an employment contract, can you also sign away copyright to all human language speech you write?
dctoedt 16y ago
1. For inventions, several U.S. states have law protecting employee's off-duty rights in a manner somewhat similar to California. See: Del. Code. Ann. 805 http://delcode.delaware.gov/title19/c008/index.shtml http://delcode.delaware.gov/title19/c008/index.shtml 765 Ill. Code 1060 http://law.justia.com/illinois/codes/2005/chapter62/2238.html http://law.justia.com/illinois/codes/2005/chapter62/2238.htm... Minn. Stat. 181.78 https://www.revisor.mn.gov/statutes/?id=181.78 https://www.revisor.mn.gov/statutes/?id=181.78 N.C. Gen. Stat. 66-57.1 http://law.onecle.com/north-carolina/66-commerce-and-business/66-57.1.html http://law.onecle.com/north-carolina/66-commerce-and-busines... Wash. Rev. Code 49.44.140 http://apps.leg.wa.gov/rcw/default.aspx?cite=49.44.140 http://apps.leg.wa.gov/rcw/default.aspx?cite=49.44.140 (This list is taken from a treatise on software law I published a number of years back; more states may have enacted similar laws since then.) ------------- 2. For copyright ownership, in the U.S., and I think in quite a few other countries, a company's ownership of an employee's "work of authorship" would depend on whether the work was either: (i) a work made for hire, usually meaning created "within the scope of employment" - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Work_for_hire http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Work_for_hire ; or (ii) assigned to the employer - which an employment contract might require the employee to do.
- kragen 16y ago
  California's law prohibits employment contracts from assigning copyright to the employer in works they do outside of work hours without employer equipment that doesn't relate to the employer's business, which narrows the scope of your 2(ii) considerably. I think I'd like to read your treatise. Can you post a link?
  - dctoedt 16y ago
    The treatise is The Law and Business of Computer Software, published by West Publishing (now a unit of Thomson Reuters). It has another author's name on the second edition, per my contract with the publisher, because I stopped doing the annual updates after 12 years, which also means I no longer get royalties so I have no financial interest in posting the link: http://west.thomson.com/productdetail/175187/13515117/productdetail.aspx http://west.thomson.com/productdetail/175187/13515117/produc... I resurrected a diagramming approach I tried some years back to show what an employer would have to prove to get ownership of an employee's off-duty invention - see http://www.ontechnologylaw.com/2010/12/diagramming-a-legal-issue-who-owns-an-employees-invention/ http://www.ontechnologylaw.com/2010/12/diagramming-a-legal-i....
jimmyjazz14 16y ago
I'm a little curious as to what legal rights (if any) a copyright holder has over a BSD licensed work. Anyone care to weigh in on this?
- how_gauche 16y ago
  In the case of a single author, the copyright holder has all the same rights he/she used to have (including to re-license under a proprietary or different open source license), except the right to revoke the open-source license already granted to people who have obtained the source. In the case of multiple authors, the legal rights of any one contributor are significantly curtailed. Unless they vote with unanimity, the license cannot easily be changed: contributor X has licensed her code to contributors Y and Z (and everyone else) under BSD licensing terms, and it cannot be relicensed without her consent unless her contribution is completely excised from the project. Even then, the waters can become murky because most code cannot just be deleted from a project, other code grows organically into and around it, so the line between what constitutes a "derivative work" and what doesn't can become really blurry.
kragen 16y ago
My own point of view is that of course it's unjust if employers are able to claim copyright on work that their employees wrote outside of work hours without using company equipment (see e.g. http://unixguru.com/ http://unixguru.com/), and that everyone reading this thread should work to reform your state or country's laws so that they are more like California's in this matter, but even California's law isn't as ironclad a protection as explicit agreement on Google's part, because I'm sure there's some way snap-server could be construed to relate to Google's business. It would be better if Google simply quitclaimed any copyright interest in snap-server over to Gregory, but of course that would even cover stuff he does at work, and it makes sense that there's an approval process for that.
tyn 16y ago
The only case where this could be acceptable is when you work in the R & D dept. of a company. If you are hired for specific tasks (which is usually the case) then everything else you do should belong to you, only. Einstein produced most of the work that led to the relativity theory while he was an employee of a patent office. Should the patent office claim anything related to his work in physics? It would be really absurd, if it did.
linuxhansl 16y ago
Nope not by California law. Work you do in your own time on your own hardware is yours. Period.
Bored_Bystander 16y ago
Given what Google engineers are paid, I see this as the ultimate whining crybaby position. If you want your own separate thing, then have the stones to quit your job, take your savings and fund your own thing. Geez. At least Google has a procedure and due process for vetting a release from the employee contract on a case by case basis. The majority of tech companies have no such process. And in fact having your own side project will raise the hackles of the employer. And a minority of smaller company owners will consider an employee with personal side projects of any kind a threat, and your career there is effectively stunted if your boss finds out. Life has decision points and you have to make choices. Only an immature person believes that they are entitled to "everything."
how_gauche 16y ago
Hello, I see the righteous indignation engine is fully spinning up on my behalf. No need: I can take care of myself, thanks. I posted this on the github thread, but: * Google has a slightly paperwork-heavy process I could have gone through to retain copyright on further contributions to this project * I chose not to use it in lieu of using a paperwork-free process which involves me assigning copyright to MY contributions under a Google copyright * I am quite happy with this situation, from a de facto standpoint my day-to-day life is completely unaffected * because the code is BSD-licensed and it REALLY doesn't matter. ...but if railing against the "man" is making you guys happy, then by all means, continue?
- bugsy 16y ago
  Very presumptuous and egotistical to think this is about you. It's not about you, it's about the code that has been contributed which requires a separate line item and which you have contributed which you state is legally owned by someone else.
  - how_gauche 16y ago
    Given that fully three quarters of the comments I've read can be paraphrased as "isn't it mean for the big bad multinational to steal the poor hacker's code just so he can get a paycheck", over a one-line commit message, it most certainly IS about me. Maybe not personally -- clearly almost nobody gives a rat's ass about me, or about Haskell code in general for that matter -- but I'm just a little exasperated by being used as a proxy cudgel to wield against my totally reasonable employer, when the people who are sniping from the peanut gallery really have no idea what the legal situation is, what I have or haven't agreed to, whether I have done this voluntarily or under coercion, etc etc. It is nice that there is some reasonable discussion coming out of this thread about the law and industry practices re: intellectual property vis-a-vis programmers, but for the most part I am pretty disappoint.
    - anthonyb 16y ago
      Given how many people on HN are in similar situations, but instead trying to start up on the side, it's absolutely relevant to them, and totally not about you. You previously said that you have to fill out paperwork in order to retain your copyright; that strongly implies that Google can deny your request. I suspect that you wouldn't be so understanding if it were Google claiming ownership of your startup instead. The question remains: is this due to a law, or a contract that you've signed? What do other developers need to do in order to make sure that they can release their side project software under their own terms, without having to jump through bureaucratic hoops or needing permission from their employer.
lukevdp 16y ago
This is from the author on that link: "Holy crap. The situation is quite simple: pre-existing work I contributed to this project remains under my copyright contributions other people make to this project remain under their own copyrights contributions I make to this project subsequent to November 2010 are under Google copyright nobody should really give a shit about this because a) I freely agreed to this even though Google has a process where I could have asked to retain my own copyright because b) the code is BSD licensed and you can use it however you like regardless of who owns the copyright. The only thing this would potentially make more difficult for me is if I wanted to re-license the code under some other terms. But I would have to obtain permission from our other contributors to do that anyways." Seems reasonable
te_platt 16y ago
There are two sides to this issue, neither of which are unfair. The employer hires people to solve problems in a given space and has a right to make sure they own what they paid for. On the other side the problem space doesn't (shouldn't) include everything. The better defined the problem space the fewer problems you will have. I've been on both sides of the issue and found that people are willing to accept both sides. The last few places I worked management was willing to change the standard contract from the normal "we own all unless you get an exception" to "we own all related directly to this specific project or done on company time/equipment". If your employer is unwilling to make the change and you are unwilling to work somewhere else consider part of the cost of working.
jellicle 16y ago
If there's one lesson to learn here: When you are joining a new company, review the agreement. If you see a non-compete clause for post-employment time periods, cross it out. If you don't see some verbiage that explicitly makes clear the company doesn't own anything you do on your own time and with your own equipment, add it in. If Google is hiring "A" employees, how come they aren't bright enough to add such a clause to their employment agreement?
mgkimsal 16y ago
I've seen a number of employer agreements indicating that they own everything that you do, whether on the clock or not. Would those companies want to have ownership/copyright assigned to everything I do automatically, even if I created child pornography, or created some IP-violating software, or broke some US-export restrictions? It seems a pretty dangerous position to take - "we own everything you do" - which assumes that everything I do is legal/safe in the first place.
wlangstroth 16y ago
Even though I'm certain no comment of mine precipitated this wild overreaction, I'd still like to make it clear that I never intended to encourage anything but academic discussion among Snap developers when I responded to Greg's comment on github. cdibona's candid description of the situation certainly does not warrant a Marxist interpretation.
zokier 16y ago
I think the copyright statement is just plain wrong currently. It should say "Copyright (c) 2010, Google, Inc. and Snap Framework authors (see CONTRIBUTORS)". Google owns only the parts made by Google employees, other parts are still owned by their respective authors.
jimmyjazz14 16y ago
I glad to see everyone is finally giving a shit about a Haskell project!

128 points by tianyicui 16y ago

tptacek 16y ago

Not a weird Google thing. Very typical IP contract term.

natrius 16y ago
Is it? Doesn't that mean that you can't do any other work for anyone (e.g. contracting, startups, side jobs) while you're working there? That seems wrong.
- aaronblohowiak 16y ago
  It may not be enforceable in California
  - tptacek 16y ago
    California does have moonlighting protection laws, which would prevent you from dealing with adverse effects simply for working on a side project.
pingswept 16y ago
It might be typical amongst large companies, but it's more extreme than the three IP agreements I've signed, and several others that I've heard of. It would take a very extreme incentive to make me sign an agreement that took all the output of my mind.
- tptacek 16y ago
  What are the agreements you've signed? The boilerplate agreement I've seen, over and over, take anything related in any way to the company's business no matter when you build it, modulo a list of specific things you enumerate before taking the job.
  - jellicle 16y ago
    That sounds like an agreement you should not sign, then.
  - pingswept 16y ago
    The agreements I've signed have been part of the contracts at the 3 engineering/design firms I've worked at: mindtribe.com, ideo.com, and greenmountainengineering.com. (I've also worked a few other places, but they were schools and an environmental foundation.) Actually, now that I think of it, the most aggressive agreement I've signed was when I was working as a researcher at a university robotics lab. In all cases, the agreements had the list of exceptions you mentioned, but they only took ownership of stuff I thought of while I was on the clock. At the last company I worked for, the agreement was very contentious-- the employees lobbied for, and eventually received, an agreement that allowed them to own not only their off-the-clock ideas, but also their on-the-clock ideas if the company didn't develop them within 6 months. (There were more details, but that's the rough idea.) At the time, I thought this was a big deal. In retrospect, I think all that stuff is just people making stuff up about what is going to happen in an imaginary future where ideas are worth millions and lawyers are free. All the same, I still refuse to sign agreements like that-- I think it distorts the way innovation actually works. As it's said, we're all standing on the shoulders of giants; I don't want to be under the control of someone who doesn't understand that.

lrm242 16y ago

The boundaries between what's yours and what's the companies is usually outlined by: a) Did you do it on the company's time? b) Did you use company equipment or resources to do it? c) Does it pertain to the company's current or future business? Item (c) is where the legal gray area shows up. It gives you enough leeway to innovate on your own time with your own stuff but it also gives the company the legal right to assert themselves if they feel you've strayed to close to "company matters". (c) is important because your employer can not control what's in your head. If you work for a company that builds cars, they don't want you thinking of a new, innovative way to build a car on your own time, leaving, patenting it, and then competing with them. This is entirely reasonable for both parties, IMO. In this particular case it looks like the author has build a web server. This clearly falls within the realm of what Google might consider their current or future business and therefore can reasonably believe that the author is using Google knowledge (even if not equipment, resourecs, or time) to build it. EDIT: Clearly every IP agreement is different; however, every one I've ever read or signed has essentially been the above. Further, there is always a schedule allowing you to outline the IP you currently own that might violate (c).

bphogan 16y ago
The problem with this line of thinking is that he's not doing it on company time and thus not being compensated for it. This guy built a web server on his own time, and now Google gets to add it to their portfolio and is not compensating him for his work. So the message is basically "We own your mind, and everything you make, and you have no choice. And we don't need to pay you because, hey, you're lucky you've got a job with us."
- enjo 16y ago
  The argument from the companies perspective: They hire you not as a implementor but as an inventor. In exchange for a salary they have hired you to provide the full value of your experience and imagination to the company. This extends beyond 'working hours' (after all, you're on salary). It is simply a way of ensuring that the companies gets it maximum value for what you invent while being compensated by them.

AndyKelley 16y ago

I just joined Amazon.com, and they explicitly state that they do NOT own work done on my own time, unless that work is in direct competition with Amazon itself: "During the course of employment and at the termination thereof, the Employee shall promptly disclose and deliver over to the Company, without additional compensation, to the extent that such disclosure could reasonably be expected to be of interest to the Company, in writing, or in such form and manner as the Company may reasonably require, the following: ... any and all algorithms, procedures or techniques related to the Company's business activities or to the Employee's work with the Company, and the essential ideas and principles underlying such algorithms, procedures or techniques, conceived, originated, adapted, discovered, developed, acquired, evaluated, tested, or applied by the Employee while employed by the Company, whether or not such algorithms, procedures or techniques are embodied in a computer program...However, the Company recognizes that the Employee may Conceive and/or Originate certain Products and/or Services which are unrelated to the activities of the Company, unrelated to the planned activities of the Company, and unrelated to any reasonable extension of the activities or planned activities of the Company ("Unrelated Products and/or Services"). The parties therefore agree, the other provisions of this Section 1 notwithstanding, that...any Unrelated Products and/or Services Conceived and/or Originated by the Employee, even while employed by the Company, shall not be considered Disclosure information..."

amock 16y ago
The problem with this is that Amazon has so many businesses that almost anything you do could be related the to company's business activities.
- writetoalok 16y ago
  ditto Google.
- Silhouette 16y ago
  This is the problem with any generalised "anything you do that might one day compete with the company" criterion. Even if an employer only claims work that an employee does on their own time that relates to any current company activities, there is still the need for an employee to know about the other project, which is hardly likely in a huge company with 100,000s of staff worldwide. I think the standard should be that things the employee does that are directly related to their own employment are what is covered. It's fair enough for an employer to claim ideas directly related to the project you're being paid to work on, and/or to say that you can't compete in closely related fields to what you're doing for your employer. However, that's a very different thing to counting effectively the entire world of software development, if anything that any part of a large software company does or ever might do could be claimed.

eplanit 16y ago

I worked for IBM years ago. I remember signing their IP contract on the day I started work, while my manager explained to me "it doesn't matter if you're vacationing on the moon -- if you invent something while there, it's ours".

iWhatever 16y ago
Yes, on your first day at IBM you were given the opportunity to declare IP that you owned. Anything else going forward belonged to Big Blue.
- markchristian 16y ago
  Not true in California -- they can only assert copyright claims on anything you build using company-owned property. So, if you did it your own time, on your own hardware, you can actually fight back against this.
  - dhimes 16y ago
    Such was also true in the 1980s (I was advised- never tested it in court). Whether a signed agreement was enforceable was pretty much a state issue, but it was generally thought that they were hard to enforce (like non-compete agreements).

bphogan 16y ago

This concept irritates me. You basically can't create things on your own if you work for a company? I just completely disagree with these kind of no-compete things. That said, I also think it's silly to sign a contract that states this as a condition of employment. I've walked away from a couple of consulting opportunities in the past because of contracts like this, but gotten a few others because I just politely asked if they would strike out that part of the contract. I understand wanting to protect your own intellectual property, but I think it's sleazy to claim ownership of things people do on their own time. It's right up there with "no competing with us for 2 years after we fire you" clauses.

llimllib 16y ago
My boss crossed off that section of his contract when he worked for Booz Allen, and nobody made a peep.
- foobarbazoo 16y ago
  I negotiated my contract with Apple; it had to go through legal and get VP-level approval, but the changes were approved. I doubt everyone can do this, though.
  - gms 16y ago
    re: your last sentence, what made your situation special?
  - bphogan 16y ago
    The lesson though is that the answer is always no unless you ask.
  - alexqgb 16y ago
    This suggests that a lot of this stuff is boilerplate. Often, it gets added to contracts because there's no cost in doing so (except to the laywer's client). At the same time, it's not necessarily part of a broader strategy to which the company is firmly, if quietly committed, and which they'll stick to, even as the costs of doing so escalate. If the baseline cost of finding and hiring the right people is at all significant, economizing by lowering resistance is a no-brainer. Just treat this stuff like default settings from a useful, if not totally UX-savvy provider of software, and don't raise any eyebrows unless you get unexpected and seemingly arbitrary or mindless pushback.

protomyth 16y ago

I do wonder how many open source / free software projects have code contributed to them that is actually owned by Google (or some other corporation) and will it come back to bite anyone?

cdibona 16y ago
See above. Since we clear employees for open source work, we can generally say that Google contributions into opens source are reviewed and okay.
- protomyth 16y ago
  Yeah, but this points to someone who didn't get clearance so I wonder if it is a unique case. Also, I am actually thinking of some other companies. Thinking about it further, some projects want copyright assignment, so one wonders if some of those weren't done properly.
  - cdibona 16y ago
    Actually, he did get clearance, that's not immediately apparant from his thread, but he was granted permission to release code into the Snap Framework under Google's copyright and an open source license.

mtviewdave 16y ago

In the state of California, Google does not have an absolute right to ownership on all work done in your spare time. From California Labor Code Section 2870: http://www.leginfo.ca.gov/cgi-bin/displaycode?section=lab&group=02001-03000&file=2870-2872 http://www.leginfo.ca.gov/cgi-bin/displaycode?section=lab&#3... They can claim ownership if the work was done with the company's property, or the work is related to the company's business. And courts in California have generally held that the relation has to be pretty strong. So a software company can't claim ownership on _all_ software products you create in your spare time, just that which is "substantially similar" to what the company does. There was a Joel on Software discussion on this a while back: http://discuss.joelonsoftware.com/default.asp?biz.5.451795.20 http://discuss.joelonsoftware.com/default.asp?biz.5.451795.2... EDIT: The above is not legal advice. Corporate and worker rights vary by country, and the U.S., by state. But I hope the above is informative to Google engineers who work in California.

how_gauche 16y ago
I don't work in California.
tianyicui 16y ago
According to the author's blog: "Gregory David Collins is a Canadian software engineer living in Zürich, Switzerland."

dstein 16y ago

I've seen this type of situation blow up pretty badly. Coworker started a side-project, quit company, side-project becomes really successful, and the company sued the ex-employee. Legally the situation was perhaps iffy (they ended up settling out of court), but it left a bad enough impression on me that I ended up leaving the company soon after, on moral grounds. I just could not work for a company that thinks they own my brain, and I will never do so again.

cdibona 16y ago
So this is really the only proper response. If you work for a company in the US or in Europe, they have claim to your creativity and work. If you don't like it, work for yourself. (see my post above for how we deal with it at Google)
- jrockway 16y ago
  They have a claim that they can waive. Everywhere I've worked except Doubleclick (bought by Google, incidentally), has done this.
- cookiecaper 16y ago
  Why do they have a claim on your general creativity? My understanding of employment is that the employer is renting my services for the tasks they want done. They say, "Hello, will you please implement these features in our system today?", and I say, "Sure." A permanent employment agreement simply means this will continue upon a regular pay schedule and compensation package for the indefinite future. It may also come with stipulations like "We'd like to hang out in our office most of the time so you can help us on-demand", or whatever, but all of those things are settled and worked out collaboratively before the candidate becomes an employee. Why does it mean they "have claim on my creativity and work" outside of this scope? I may sign additional non-compete agreements that make it so that I can't engage in any threatening or similar business. I may sign non-disclosure agreements that make it so I can't use any proprietary or secret information that belongs to the company. However, why should I sign an agreement that allows the company to take things they've had nothing to do with without any pay? Does the employee have power to take from the employer without providing compensation? Why should the employer have that power?

cdibona 16y ago

So, under California law, which is probably the most liberal in the United States coving IP, you are prescribed from competing with your employer even on your own time or on your own equipment. This is reinforced in industry employment agreements, including Google's (my employer) Most employers take the position that everything you do in the space is logically competitive. Recognizing that, we, Google, make it very easy to get permission to open source things, but under Google copyright. We have a process for releasing under your own copyright, but it is not as flexible. That said, we've cleared about 200 (75% of those requested) projects in the last year for copyright release. It's easy to get knee-jerk about this and get upset, but recognizing the nature of IP in a company and acting on it is infinitely better than pretending the problem doesn't exist and then, in the future, retroactively claiming copyright when convenient. The latter leads to lawsuits and unfair restraints on creativity and competition. This system works. We've released 10s of millions of lines of code into thousands of open source projects. It protects the employees and it protects Google and the price is a bit of complexity and the odd thread like this. Also, thanks to this system, Googlers can work on Google equipment and during their 20% on these kinds of projects, which is clearly useful and recognizes that people who work on open source almost universally do so without regard to the machinery or network they use.

cookiecaper 16y ago
Don't you think that this system is at least a little bit unfair? Why does Google automatically get claim on work that has no relation to Google, done without compensation from Google, and without any of Google's equipment or facilities? How come these people need Google permission to assert a claim on their own intellectual property that is entirely distinct from anything involving Google? It sounds like this was established simply so that Google can claim things that they have no real right to claim and misappropriate an employee's work as convenient. How come you can't just say "All work on Google-owned software is copyright Google. All work directly assigned by Google management is copyright Google. All work performed wholly independently and separate from Google by Google employees is copyright its respective owners."? I don't get it.
- cdibona 16y ago

MoreMoschops 16y ago

Am I the only person who thinks he wasn't being serious, and is now just seeing how long he can keep a straight face?

bhickey 16y ago

My employer is sensible about this issue. Everyone files an IP declaration enumerating the projects that are or may become relevant to the company's business. Since this determination is made at their sole discretion, I threw the kitchen sink at it and wrote down everything. From the date of that declaration, they have a 90 day period in which they have an exclusive option to negotiate to buy. I am obliged to negotiate in good faith, but I am not obliged to sell. After that window, the option goes up in smoke.

dhimes 16y ago
I'm impressed by that. I've never heard of such freedom, but it strikes me that since so many people are considering startups now that such an agreement may be a competitive advantage by which companies can compete for employees. If I'm reading you right you make this declaration when you are hired. What happens if you start a project while you are (already) at the company?
- bhickey 16y ago
  I've only been here for a month, and the policy has already been revised since I arrived! The 90-day timeout is new. I'm happy with it. If I got a new idea project idea that wasn't tied to alpha capture systems, I don't think there would be any issue with amending my declaration. Before my time, there was an expansive policy that asserted ownership over everything. The old policy might not have even been enforceable in the UK. Some employees raised concerns about it, management responded. The company is small (~60 employees/~25 devs), so there tends to be a lot of flexibility.

bugsy 16y ago

For this comment, let's assume that Google is correct that it owns copyright on all code he writes, even in his free time and not pertaining to his work at Google. Now, that presumed, when an author contributes to the project, they explicitly agree to license their contributions under to the project's BSD license. However, Google owns this code being contributed, and yet they, as a corporate entity, have not consented to the licensing of their contributions being distributed under the BSD license. Until they do, in writing, signed by the corporate legal counsel, or whoever else is able to sign contracts on their behalf, the code contributed is not BSD licensed because the author, which is Google Inc, did not agree to it in writing, and thus distribution and use is now a violation of Google's copyright since they did not legally consent to have their code released. As the owner of the code, Google alone can consent to its use, and not the "code slave resource" who happened to produce it, whose very soul Google now contractually owns. This could be a problem for the project. In general, projects need to require that anyone contributing new code represent that they alone are the owners of the copyright to the new code being contributed. If you contribute code owned by someone else and not explicitly licensed in a compatible manner by that other entity, then you have code in the project that presents a serious legal liability.

cdibona 16y ago
But in this case, we released the code , under Google Copyright, into a BSD project and under a BSD license.
- bugsy 16y ago
  It's not clear who is 'we'? Do you (plural) have the legal right to sign contracts and take out bank loans on Google's behalf? If so, yes, you represent Google legally as the official legal representative and this is all cool. The code should just have a link to the signed document placing the code under BSD.
  - cdibona 16y ago
    So contracts and bank loans take a higher strata of employees to approve, but I've been given authority on open source matters. It's not practical to have a signed document on file with every project, but we do have such documents on file with the FSF, Apache and many other projects. It's not always practical to do these docs, but they are out there. This is one of the great things about open source, through the use of real , trusted open source licenses, we state our corporate intention quite clearly, and then we don't need to have a huge load of paper that accompanies every project. We don't , for instance, have paperwork clearing the ip on all the projects we use at Google. The linux kernel alone is a huge work of shared copyright. No paper....

comice 16y ago

What else of Google's employees stuff do Google get to own? If they get into debt, does Google share that too?

runningdogx 16y ago
And, as johnl asked in the github thread, does Google hold copyright on Chris's comments here on HN? Code, comments... they're both speech. If you can sign away code copyright in an employment contract, can you also sign away copyright to all human language speech you write?

dctoedt 16y ago

1. For inventions, several U.S. states have law protecting employee's off-duty rights in a manner somewhat similar to California. See: Del. Code. Ann. 805 http://delcode.delaware.gov/title19/c008/index.shtml http://delcode.delaware.gov/title19/c008/index.shtml 765 Ill. Code 1060 http://law.justia.com/illinois/codes/2005/chapter62/2238.html http://law.justia.com/illinois/codes/2005/chapter62/2238.htm... Minn. Stat. 181.78 https://www.revisor.mn.gov/statutes/?id=181.78 https://www.revisor.mn.gov/statutes/?id=181.78 N.C. Gen. Stat. 66-57.1 http://law.onecle.com/north-carolina/66-commerce-and-business/66-57.1.html http://law.onecle.com/north-carolina/66-commerce-and-busines... Wash. Rev. Code 49.44.140 http://apps.leg.wa.gov/rcw/default.aspx?cite=49.44.140 http://apps.leg.wa.gov/rcw/default.aspx?cite=49.44.140 (This list is taken from a treatise on software law I published a number of years back; more states may have enacted similar laws since then.) ------------- 2. For copyright ownership, in the U.S., and I think in quite a few other countries, a company's ownership of an employee's "work of authorship" would depend on whether the work was either: (i) a work made for hire, usually meaning created "within the scope of employment" - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Work_for_hire http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Work_for_hire ; or (ii) assigned to the employer - which an employment contract might require the employee to do.

kragen 16y ago
California's law prohibits employment contracts from assigning copyright to the employer in works they do outside of work hours without employer equipment that doesn't relate to the employer's business, which narrows the scope of your 2(ii) considerably. I think I'd like to read your treatise. Can you post a link?
- dctoedt 16y ago
  The treatise is The Law and Business of Computer Software, published by West Publishing (now a unit of Thomson Reuters). It has another author's name on the second edition, per my contract with the publisher, because I stopped doing the annual updates after 12 years, which also means I no longer get royalties so I have no financial interest in posting the link: http://west.thomson.com/productdetail/175187/13515117/productdetail.aspx http://west.thomson.com/productdetail/175187/13515117/produc... I resurrected a diagramming approach I tried some years back to show what an employer would have to prove to get ownership of an employee's off-duty invention - see http://www.ontechnologylaw.com/2010/12/diagramming-a-legal-issue-who-owns-an-employees-invention/ http://www.ontechnologylaw.com/2010/12/diagramming-a-legal-i....

jimmyjazz14 16y ago

I'm a little curious as to what legal rights (if any) a copyright holder has over a BSD licensed work. Anyone care to weigh in on this?

how_gauche 16y ago
In the case of a single author, the copyright holder has all the same rights he/she used to have (including to re-license under a proprietary or different open source license), except the right to revoke the open-source license already granted to people who have obtained the source. In the case of multiple authors, the legal rights of any one contributor are significantly curtailed. Unless they vote with unanimity, the license cannot easily be changed: contributor X has licensed her code to contributors Y and Z (and everyone else) under BSD licensing terms, and it cannot be relicensed without her consent unless her contribution is completely excised from the project. Even then, the waters can become murky because most code cannot just be deleted from a project, other code grows organically into and around it, so the line between what constitutes a "derivative work" and what doesn't can become really blurry.

kragen 16y ago

My own point of view is that of course it's unjust if employers are able to claim copyright on work that their employees wrote outside of work hours without using company equipment (see e.g. http://unixguru.com/ http://unixguru.com/), and that everyone reading this thread should work to reform your state or country's laws so that they are more like California's in this matter, but even California's law isn't as ironclad a protection as explicit agreement on Google's part, because I'm sure there's some way snap-server could be construed to relate to Google's business. It would be better if Google simply quitclaimed any copyright interest in snap-server over to Gregory, but of course that would even cover stuff he does at work, and it makes sense that there's an approval process for that.

tyn 16y ago

The only case where this could be acceptable is when you work in the R & D dept. of a company. If you are hired for specific tasks (which is usually the case) then everything else you do should belong to you, only. Einstein produced most of the work that led to the relativity theory while he was an employee of a patent office. Should the patent office claim anything related to his work in physics? It would be really absurd, if it did.

linuxhansl 16y ago

Nope not by California law. Work you do in your own time on your own hardware is yours. Period.

Bored_Bystander 16y ago

Given what Google engineers are paid, I see this as the ultimate whining crybaby position. If you want your own separate thing, then have the stones to quit your job, take your savings and fund your own thing. Geez. At least Google has a procedure and due process for vetting a release from the employee contract on a case by case basis. The majority of tech companies have no such process. And in fact having your own side project will raise the hackles of the employer. And a minority of smaller company owners will consider an employee with personal side projects of any kind a threat, and your career there is effectively stunted if your boss finds out. Life has decision points and you have to make choices. Only an immature person believes that they are entitled to "everything."

how_gauche 16y ago

Hello, I see the righteous indignation engine is fully spinning up on my behalf. No need: I can take care of myself, thanks. I posted this on the github thread, but: * Google has a slightly paperwork-heavy process I could have gone through to retain copyright on further contributions to this project * I chose not to use it in lieu of using a paperwork-free process which involves me assigning copyright to MY contributions under a Google copyright * I am quite happy with this situation, from a de facto standpoint my day-to-day life is completely unaffected * because the code is BSD-licensed and it REALLY doesn't matter. ...but if railing against the "man" is making you guys happy, then by all means, continue?

bugsy 16y ago
Very presumptuous and egotistical to think this is about you. It's not about you, it's about the code that has been contributed which requires a separate line item and which you have contributed which you state is legally owned by someone else.
- how_gauche 16y ago
  Given that fully three quarters of the comments I've read can be paraphrased as "isn't it mean for the big bad multinational to steal the poor hacker's code just so he can get a paycheck", over a one-line commit message, it most certainly IS about me. Maybe not personally -- clearly almost nobody gives a rat's ass about me, or about Haskell code in general for that matter -- but I'm just a little exasperated by being used as a proxy cudgel to wield against my totally reasonable employer, when the people who are sniping from the peanut gallery really have no idea what the legal situation is, what I have or haven't agreed to, whether I have done this voluntarily or under coercion, etc etc. It is nice that there is some reasonable discussion coming out of this thread about the law and industry practices re: intellectual property vis-a-vis programmers, but for the most part I am pretty disappoint.
  - anthonyb 16y ago
    Given how many people on HN are in similar situations, but instead trying to start up on the side, it's absolutely relevant to them, and totally not about you. You previously said that you have to fill out paperwork in order to retain your copyright; that strongly implies that Google can deny your request. I suspect that you wouldn't be so understanding if it were Google claiming ownership of your startup instead. The question remains: is this due to a law, or a contract that you've signed? What do other developers need to do in order to make sure that they can release their side project software under their own terms, without having to jump through bureaucratic hoops or needing permission from their employer.

lukevdp 16y ago

This is from the author on that link: "Holy crap. The situation is quite simple: pre-existing work I contributed to this project remains under my copyright contributions other people make to this project remain under their own copyrights contributions I make to this project subsequent to November 2010 are under Google copyright nobody should really give a shit about this because a) I freely agreed to this even though Google has a process where I could have asked to retain my own copyright because b) the code is BSD licensed and you can use it however you like regardless of who owns the copyright. The only thing this would potentially make more difficult for me is if I wanted to re-license the code under some other terms. But I would have to obtain permission from our other contributors to do that anyways." Seems reasonable

te_platt 16y ago

There are two sides to this issue, neither of which are unfair. The employer hires people to solve problems in a given space and has a right to make sure they own what they paid for. On the other side the problem space doesn't (shouldn't) include everything. The better defined the problem space the fewer problems you will have. I've been on both sides of the issue and found that people are willing to accept both sides. The last few places I worked management was willing to change the standard contract from the normal "we own all unless you get an exception" to "we own all related directly to this specific project or done on company time/equipment". If your employer is unwilling to make the change and you are unwilling to work somewhere else consider part of the cost of working.

jellicle 16y ago

If there's one lesson to learn here: When you are joining a new company, review the agreement. If you see a non-compete clause for post-employment time periods, cross it out. If you don't see some verbiage that explicitly makes clear the company doesn't own anything you do on your own time and with your own equipment, add it in. If Google is hiring "A" employees, how come they aren't bright enough to add such a clause to their employment agreement?

mgkimsal 16y ago

I've seen a number of employer agreements indicating that they own everything that you do, whether on the clock or not. Would those companies want to have ownership/copyright assigned to everything I do automatically, even if I created child pornography, or created some IP-violating software, or broke some US-export restrictions? It seems a pretty dangerous position to take - "we own everything you do" - which assumes that everything I do is legal/safe in the first place.

wlangstroth 16y ago

Even though I'm certain no comment of mine precipitated this wild overreaction, I'd still like to make it clear that I never intended to encourage anything but academic discussion among Snap developers when I responded to Greg's comment on github. cdibona's candid description of the situation certainly does not warrant a Marxist interpretation.

zokier 16y ago

I think the copyright statement is just plain wrong currently. It should say "Copyright (c) 2010, Google, Inc. and Snap Framework authors (see CONTRIBUTORS)". Google owns only the parts made by Google employees, other parts are still owned by their respective authors.

jimmyjazz14 16y ago

I glad to see everyone is finally giving a shit about a Haskell project!