16 ms·

Google claims copyright on employee side projects

738 points by zoobab 7y ago

Tomte 7y ago
I'd be very wary to base my legal strategy on DeMorgan. Is it inconceivable that a judge might rule that the intention is clear and a minor clerical error doesn't matter?
- marcan_42 7y ago
  I signed a contract, I didn't sign CA labor code which doesn't even apply within the same continent and which the contract does not reference in any way. I'm pretty sure they can't claim they get to enforce what they intended to write just because I happened to guess what that was by Googling parts of my contract. What I signed is what I signed, and the wording was clear in the contract.
  - TrickyRick 7y ago
    If someone asks you to bring wine or beer to a party, do you usually bring both? Because that would still be valid in an OR statement but basing your ordinary life decisions on boolean logic doesn't always work out like you expect it. If a contract is written as: You own things you make on your own time unless you're using company equipment provided: * The thing does not relate to company business * The thing does not result from work you do for the company It's pretty clear cut what this means and a judge would not care for boolean logic. Of course it's hard to know for sure without knowing the exact wording of the contract.
    - YawningAngel 7y ago
      Yes, I think that if someone asked me to bring "wine or beer" to a party, literally everyone I know would be fine with me bringing a bit of both. In fact, what would be weird would be someone objecting to my bringing both on the grounds that they meant, but didn't say, "xor". I don't think this contract is ambiguous in natural language. Or is generally inclusive, and if you want xor you either write xor or use some cumbersome circumlocution.
      - wisienkas 7y ago
        I would call them out if they object and was to sloopy to write "either X or Y"
      - Retric 7y ago
        XOR is the natural use of or in English. Do you want to get subs or pizza? Are you going to vote for A or B? Logical OR is often written as ‘and or’. Do you want to see a movie and or get dinner? https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/And/or https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/And/or That said it’s not a universal standard and like most of English has wide regional differences.
        YawningAngel 7y ago
        I think whether "or" means inclusive or or xor is in fact ambiguous and determined by context in English. I think if you as a megacorp write ambiguous contracts and try to enforce them against your employees, you do not deserve a sympathetic interpretation from the courts.
        kilotaras 7y ago
        In fact such interpretations of contract ambiguities (in favor of weaker party) are even codified in some countries, most notably the whole of EU [1] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contra_proferentem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contra_proferentem
        tomtomtom777 7y ago
        That or is not really a XOR becomes clear when you negate it. I don't want subs or pizza. I am not going to vote for A or B. I would say OR is the natural use, and exclusion is implied by the context in these examples.
        Retric 7y ago
        There are plenty of examples where A and B is treated as a negation of A or B. “Do you want A or B? Why not both?” As one example from a popular mime. https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/why-not-both-why-dont-we-have-both https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/why-not-both-why-dont-we-have...
    - HelloNurse 7y ago
      > You own things you make on your own time unless you're using company equipment provided: * The thing does not relate to company business * The thing does not result from work you do for the company While "on your own time" and "using company equipment" are reasonably clear concepts, the other two clauses are too debatable to be an acceptable risk. It's not a matter of Boolean logic.
    - marcan_42 7y ago
      There was an explicit "or", it wasn't just two clauses in a list. And "or" vs "xor" doesn't make any sense here, if it were "xor" then Google would own anything you did by actual default (i.e. that had neither anything to do with Google's business nor resulted from work done for Google), which makes no sense. It is explicitly an "or" and clearly means inclusive or, not exclusive or.
petjuh 7y ago
Were those side projects done during work hours or using Google's equipment?
- DigitalSea 7y ago
  Some of the side projects he worked on prior to joining Google. >Like many Googlers, I had projects I worked on in my spare time. Some of those I carried over from before joining. >When I joined, I submitted two projects that I was actively working on at the time, largely just maintaining: AsbestOS (yes, those were the PS3 Linux days) and usbmuxd (iPhone USB comms daemon, you probably have it if you have Ubuntu!).
  - ownagefool 7y ago
    They also said it wasn't during work hours or on googles equipment. Though, honestly, I doubt I really even agree on the equipment clause when it. When said equipment is a laptop and a phone, using their device would be more about not wanting to carry multiple devices than any interstice value gained by the equipment.
    - mamon 7y ago
      I think this restriction makes more sense in other industries, such as pharmaceuticals, where lab equipment can cost millions of dollars, so employee doing their own "side projects" on it is more real abuse of company property.
      - ownagefool 7y ago
        I'd typically agree, there is a solid argument there and the premise as a whole makes sense, I just think trivialities should be excluded, and that standard software development is fairly trivial use. Once you test such software against company owned datasets, it's a different ballgame.
- Eikon 7y ago
  It's crazy that the "using X company equipment" legal basis works at all in those disputes. Most of the time, "equipment" seems to mean "laptop". IHMO when "equipment" is such a commodity as a laptop, this should never even be an issue. That's like a newspaper that would claims the work of one of it's journalist who is writing books on his personal time on the basis that the book was written with a pencil he brought home from work.
RandomInteger4 7y ago
Honestly, what kind of side projects can one conceivably have working a full time job that mist often involves overtime? Let's be realistic here. Chances are you're not being a competent employee if you can manage to devote brain cells to more programming outside of work, or you're likely hyped up on the adderalls, which more than likely will lead to amphetamine psychosis in the long run.
- DigitalSea 7y ago
  What are you talking about? Most developers I know have side projects, I have quite a few of them and work a 40 hour per week job with a wife and kids. I love what I do, so I keep doing it outside of work hours. No drugs needed to hype me up.
- _se 7y ago
  Please stop projecting your own shortcomings onto other developers. It is completely possible to have meaningful side projects and many people love doing it.
anilakar 7y ago
And at-will employment turns unenforceable laws into binding contracts. Sick.
draugadrotten 7y ago
Does society accept this behaviour outside tech? Imagine that a Michelin restaurant would claim copyright on the dishes cooked by the chef in his spare time. Or that the big farm would ask for a piece of those carrots grown in the back yard.
- maxerickson 7y ago
  Lots of people are employed with an understanding that they won't compete with the employer. Google's stance is on the aggressive end of things, but that's where the California law is coming from.
  - rs23296008n1 7y ago
    The problem with an aggressive stance is that the response is then likely combative as well. Google isn't alone in this. Plenty of other companies have the same clauses. They already know these clauses have consequences but they are trying to address real fears / visible threats of their own. All that said, <humor style=wry> I'm fairly sure unionisation and other reactive responses such as further government red tape wont bother them at all. </humor>
- _trampeltier 7y ago
  There are a lot of things different in the "real" world and the "software" world. Nobody would accept underwear with a build in camera, gps tracker and a microphone wo give the data to x companys. But with a cellphone (almost) everybody is ok. Also if something goes wrong with software, it's the customers problem. The customer accepted the contract with no rights for him (software AS IS, no warranty), nobody would accept a such contract in the "real" world.
  - sidpatil 7y ago
    > The customer accepted the contract with no rights for him (software AS IS, no warranty) That's only specific to FOSS.
    - 7y ago
thundergolfer 7y ago
This isn't surprising, though it does suck that employees have to jump through these hoops to avoid having our work claimed by employers. The way to go is to never use company resources or company time when working on personal things and also never work on something that they'd want. Sometimes it's convenient to break the first 2 rules so it's annoying to make sure to never use my work laptop/internet/office when working on personal stuff, but it's doable. The last bit is certainly quite tricky when you're at Google but I'm at Canva (design+marketing softwares) so all of my stuff is fine. For stuff you'd like to monetise we send an email to our 'bosses' about it and they give an upfront a-OK.
- clarry 7y ago
  > Sometimes it's convenient to break the first 2 rules so it's annoying to make sure to never use my work laptop/internet/office when working on personal stuff, but it's doable. For me, remote work makes this very easy. My office is a bedroom in my apartment. My internet plan. I have a work laptop, strictly for work stuff, and my own laptop right next to it. I don't work on my own projects on company time, but I might on a lunch break (when I'm clocked out). (I occasionally use my own laptop to help with work stuff though -- having an extra device with an ethernet port comes in handy for tcpdumping stuff without having to try isolate the traffic I want from everything else going through the work laptop)
- lonelappde 7y ago
  What does a trillion dollar R&D company NOT work on?
mothsonasloth 7y ago
TRWTF is doing the IARC process. The author should have just "failed" to declare it. Then when it came for the exit interview, not mention their side projects. Keep calm and carry on.
FpUser 7y ago
I was lucky that I've always had my own projects/products and I was employed as a full time software developer only once in my life. During the hiring they brought me a contract that had this sleazy IP clause. I told them that there is no way I can sign anything like that but will be more then happy to sign simple and fair non compete clause. The employer did just that: they replaced the IP ownership clause.
wccrawford 7y ago
The tweeter admits that Google's policy has changed since then. "I guess they've realized this was a dumb policy, because under the current rules what I did was totally fine."
- onli 7y ago
  That's just about the process for a single off patch. Not claiming copyright on what employees do in their own free time/before starting to work at the company.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
S_A_P 7y ago
I do software consulting sleeved through various contracting or consulting companies. All of the paperwork I have to sign tries to have a claim to any IP created at the job. I immediately red line this unless there is some sort of reasonableness to it. I don’t mind giving some percentage of IP to a company that kept me busy somewhere for a year and the Resultant IP isn’t the main focus of the engagement. They are right that it probably wouldn’t have happened if they had not given me the opportunity. Otherwise I am not going to relinquish the right rights to code written to solve a problem. Most clauses I’ve seen are in this vein. Nope. DRY.
- rs23296008n1 7y ago
  DRY?
  - AshwinDurairaj 7y ago
    Think he means DYR, do your research.
  - S_A_P 7y ago
    Dont repeat yourself. IF you have code that solves a problem, dont rewrite it at every gig...
    - rs23296008n1 7y ago
      Now thats a philosophy I both agree and disagree with. Agree: omg do i need to write this form again? Seriously just write a library already! Disagree: this problem is subtly yet incompatibly different to what I've seen and dealt with before. The library would need x,y,z but their IP demands mean I'd lose rights to my closed-source library or be forced to open source it to keep using it elsewhere.
      - S_A_P 7y ago
        I agree with you. The only absolute is that there are no absolutes. However what the practical application of DRY ends up being for me is that I have a "bag of tricks" I carry with me as well as my own "library o' repetitious programming tasks" that I look into first. Much of the time I can save a lot of time by reusing old code. I may have a bit of code that is too specific for the original purpose and get tired of the technical debt it causes, and re-write it. So in that case I am repeating myself, but its with the benefit of experience. More of a refactor than repeat.
josemanuel 7y ago
That's common practice for American companies.
kaisuketrax 7y ago
This is why the need for aliases and anonymity is crucial in these situations. Do your thing but if you value it, take necessary precautions.
- onion2k 7y ago
  Google could claim ownership and damages if you deliberately hid a successful side project from them. Even if they didn't find out, the risk would certainly be enough to scare off any potential investors or disrupt an exit.
cauliflower99 7y ago
Was his name Richard from 'Silicon Valley'?
vesche 7y ago
Are we really at the point where we're using 100 tweets to write what should be in a blog post?
- teddyh 7y ago
  To have impact, ideas need to spread. Since most people don’t blog anymore, they can’t reblog other people’s blog posts. But they can retweet other people’s tweets.
  - marcan_42 7y ago
    This, pretty much. I do have a blog, but 1) it's mildly more annoying to update, 2) I have >30K Twitter followers, I assume maybe 5 people have my RSS feed in a reader somewhere, and 3) I didn't actually expect it to turn out this long, but I was already typing things up into the Twitter boxes, so shrug, and 4) Twitter seems to be the place for this sort of discussion these days; my blog doesn't even have comments. I'll use my blog for long technical posts though. Those make more sense there.
    - ghaff 7y ago
      Of course, you can/should link to the blog from Twitter. But clicking through is still some friction so Twitter alone sort of substitutes for the one or two paragraph blogpost "sketches" I used to write. (I preach creating a blog version of longer threads but I don't really do it myself in practice.)
- ghaff 7y ago
  I don't like it either but I understand why people do it for both the virality and the low friction of getting something written very informally out there easily. I do wish that, when people do it, they'd also compile it into a blog to give it more permanent form.
- eequah9L 7y ago
  We are and we have been for a while now :) I'm not a fan, but there is one interesting upside--Twitter makes it simple to react to any one of those paragraphs, and spin off another discussion. The emergent graph of reactions is much more fine-grained than what blogs allowed.
A4ET8a8uTh0 7y ago
I personally think this is just another step in a series of many reminding us that Google has become just another US corporation. And a way those grow is by finding 'efficiencies','doing more with less' and leveraging their size. It is an end of an era. Then again, Jimmy Johns was always pretty bad for the workers and attempted to have kids working there signing non-competes. Maybe we should be happy it took google so long. edit: 2 more paragraphs
- microcolonel 7y ago
  > Google has become just another US corporation There are many other U.S. corporations who manage to do business without betraying their employees like this.
- jsolson 7y ago
  > Maybe we should be happy it took google so long. If you read the thread you'll note that this policy has been around for a long time (at least the ~7 years I've been with Google). The author also notes that, in terms of open source, things have become dramatically _more_ permissive over time.
  - asdfasgasdgasdg 7y ago
    Longer than me too and I've been there since the mid aughts.
    - bhelkey 7y ago
      > "Mid-aughts" refers to the first decade of a century. > https://hinative.com/en-US/questions/1300361 https://hinative.com/en-US/questions/1300361 In case anyone else is unfamiliar with this term.
  - deogeo 7y ago
    That's exactly it, isn't it? Thanks to such restrictive contracts, you need Google's permission.
nullc 7y ago
At my prior company we explicitly disclaimed copyright interest in employee contributions to a long list of standard open source software which included by reference the entire OIN Linux system definition, specifically to avoid any complication related to employees contributing patches back to the open source tools they used in the course of their work (and accordingly this covered not just work done on their own time, but also contributions made the course of their work). Employees were also invited to nominate additional pieces of software fairly liberally, particularly free software that didn't overlap with the organization's central business. While promoting permissive approaches like this with other organizations I've encountered employers which seem to have a some confusion about the purposes of different parts of their agreement. E.g. an IP agreement is essentially unrelated to making sure an employee is doing their job-- so a "I don't want them spending a lot of time on that" isn't a valid reason to impinge their rights, after all they would be perfectly able to slack off by staring blankly at the coffee pot regardless of what your IP agreement says. An IP agreement should be about having a clear boundary on company property, it's not a replacement for effective management. Unless you're an operating system company (which to some extent google is, but very few of the innumerable companies that copy google's practices are), trivial fixes to widely used open source software are not good candidates for company property and are not at all candidates for it if developed on the employee's own time.
- Xylakant 7y ago
  I really like that approach - is there any chance to get more information about that list? Like how it was compiled and maintained, maybe even the list itself?
strenholme 7y ago
It is my understanding that there has never been a case in California where a court has said “OK, your employer owns that open source patch you made at 3am on your own laptop”. Poking around, Applied Materials, Inc. v. Advanced Micro-Fabrication Equipment comes to mind; here is a summary: https://www.arnoldporter.com/en/perspectives/publications/2009/06/ip-alert-new-decision-may-undermine-claims-to-ip__ https://www.arnoldporter.com/en/perspectives/publications/20... The only public case I know of where a company has been able to claim the open source software someone made in their own time is the Nginx case which is ongoing right now in Russia. [1] I remember a story about someone in the US (not in California) where they were asked by their employer to stop working on open source Perl code in their own spare time, but there was, as I recall, no litigation there. As for myself, I am very careful to make it clear, when signing an “inventions” clause, that I will work on MaraDNS in my own personal time while employed. I also go to a lot of effort to date stamp my open source code, and to only use versions of my open source code written before I signed the “inventions” clause for anything work related. Actually, I prefer working as an independent contractor for employers who do not burden me with an “inventions” clause. [1] The details are different: As I understand it, Igor Sysoev was given permission from his employer to work on nginx while at the job, and the legal stuff didn’t come up for well over a decade after Sysoev left Rambler, and, of course, it’s in Russia, so it’s somewhat different than the “3am commit on one’s own laptop in California” issue.
- TACIXAT 7y ago
  If that is the case then why is this a law? Why isn't the law more clear to reflect reality? I don't really want a gun pointed at me, regardless of whether I'm about to get shot. The threat and power structure is still there.
  - pc86 7y ago
    Because there's no incentive to change the law precisely because it's never been a problem. Despite the popular narrative, legislators are typically pretty busy (a lot of this is self-inflicted, though). So striking a law that has never been enforced a certain way because it might be enforced that way isn't a very productive use of their limited time, especially when courts have ruled quite the opposite.
chillly 7y ago
"Don't be evil" is looking more and more hollow.
danielovichdk 7y ago
Don't sign a contract if you don't like its content. This can hardly come as a surprise if it is started in the employees contract
hirako2000 7y ago
The rational can't be entirely wrong. In tech, skills and ideas gained during employment help generate new ideas. Since you are paid and trained, there is this incentive to profit from everything you produce. Companies use tricks such as 'coded on the corporate hardware', 'non compete agreement' etc. Grow some common sense, do all your side project strictly outside office hours, on your own hardware, in domains that don't even remotely relate to what your employer's industries , and it will be very hard for the emplying organisation to come after you. I could inspect everything my organisation does, how they do it, then bake something up that technically outperforms it, then quit and work on marketing, again Leveraging everything I've learned, their mistakes and success. Would that be fair? On the contrary, working for an optic company and developing oil drilling optimisation methods to sell once in quit, would they even come after me? It's fair, won't trigger any suspicion or even interest in pursuing litigation.
- gmac 7y ago
  in domains that don't even remotely relate to what your employer's industries is hard when your employer is as big and wide-ranging as Google.
pabs3 7y ago
When I was renegotiating my contract, Software Freedom Conservancy reminded me that everything is negotiable, so I negotiated ownership of all open source code I produce for my employer in addition to the existing ownership of side projects. https://sfconservancy.org/contractpatch/ https://sfconservancy.org/contractpatch/ https://lists.sfconservancy.org/pipermail/contractpatch/2018-February/000014.html https://lists.sfconservancy.org/pipermail/contractpatch/2018...
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
ossworkerrights 7y ago
It is time to deprive large corporations of the privilege of using open source to generate profits based on people’s free work. It is high noon for saas restrictive open source licenses. Spread the wealth along small indie devs.
tytso 7y ago
Oh, please. It's standard industry practice for companies to claim ownership of everything a software engineer comes up with, even "on their own time". The problem is it's extremely difficult to say, figure out when someone might have invented some super clever idea which can be pantented "on their own time". This was true when I worked for MIT, VA Linux, IBM, and Google. At VA Linux it was the VC's which insisted on that clause in the employee's contracts. So anyone who think this is some evidence of Google being, or becoming, evil is either seriously misinformed, or just engaging in unthinking hate of Google, or both. In fact, Google has one of the most permissive IP policies that I've seen at any company except for VA Linux Systems. The default is that the vast majority of work done by an employee can be released under an open source license. Sure, there's a process that you have to go through, and unless what you want to do intersects with work that you are doing for your team that isn't intended to be released publically, or competes with a critical company initiative, the default answer is that it will be allowed to be released. This is not true for many, if not most companies, and as a responsible open source maintainer, I make sure that people understand they have permission from their company before I accept their open source contributions. Otherwise, I would be putting them, and the project, at risk. (Note that because of this, there are many employees which are not allowed to participate in open source development, because their employers will not give them permission to release code written by an employee under an open source license, whether written "on their own time" or not.) At Google, once you get this (mostly pro forma) permission, you can work on open source projects on your own time, or on 20% time, using company laptops, or using GCE resources, etc. When I was hired at Google, my manager and I cut a deal such that I could work on Linux Kernel and community projects for 50% of my time, instead of the normal 20%. Sure, the overlap between what was good for Google and what was good for ext4/Linux was pretty broad, but Google also paid for me to travel to various conferences in Asia, Australia, Europe, etc. Also unique to Google is there is a process by which you can get permission for you to out-and-out own the work done on your own time, as opposed to Google owning it and releasing it under an open source license. If you take that option then it really has to be done on your own time, and must not use any company resources, meaning not on a company laptop, or on a company network, etc. This is rare, and I'm not aware of many other companies that give employees that option.
- 7y ago
fierarul 7y ago
> Oh, please. It's standard industry practice for companies to claim ownership of everything a software engineer comes up with, even "on their own time". In the US. Problem is the US is infecting the rest of the world too, especially through subsidiaries which basically just translate from English the 'standard' employment contract. I had to refuse employment in Romania since the clauses were so broad and basically illegal under Romanian law. (Of course, I had no interest in proving in court they were illegal but the contract was reviewed by an attorney on my side). So, yeah, maybe apply some logic. If the employer owns your brain 24h/day maybe the hourly rate your are getting is not such a great deal. And don't get me stared on clauses the survive the contract, including multi-year employment bans to competitors, etc. For a large multinational that basically mean you have to get a job landscaping or something because they compete with anybody would offer you a comparable job for your skills. This 'standard industry practice' should die.
- q3k 7y ago
  Can confirm from my experience (~10 years in the industry). I've never even heard of this practice until I applied to Google. None of the EU companies I've worked at before had anything like this. None of the EU companies I've worked at since had anything like this. It's US imperialism, nothing less.
  - shadowgovt 7y ago
    I think you make an excellent point, in particular regarding the fact that this is a US-based policy. US copyright law is extremely friendly to individual creators at the expense of corporations. It makes corporations bend over backwards to avoid getting into a messy legal dispute with somebody that they've employed to create for them. This policy is so broad because if an individual Google employee were to try and claim that basically anything they came up with (including things that were, common sense dictates, done as work for Google) had been done on their own time, the burden of proof would be on Google to prove otherwise.
    - franga2000 7y ago
Yizahi 7y ago
"usbmuxd was rejected without an explanation. My follow-up email asking for clarification was ignored." Isn't it funny that Google employees themselves at least sometimes can taste how other Google "products" feel when their accounts are banned, deleted and there is zero ways to appeal such decisions?
- thedaemon 7y ago
  What's really funny to me is Google trying to claim copyright on a GPL project.
  - thedaemon 7y ago
    Downvoted for facts?
- TACIXAT 7y ago
  I think most Google employees are aware of that problem and wish there was a better support structure in place. They aren't paid 300k per year to deal with some random account request though, they are paid to write systems that deal with one billion accounts, so there is not much opportunity there. Until the tech giants hire massive support workforces, this isn't something engineers can do anything about.
  - Yizahi 7y ago
    Well someone did wrote all those automated banhammer scripts, right? I don't think DMCA requires automated ban system, Google invented it voluntarily.
    - marcan_42 7y ago
      Hey, I had nothing to do with Content ID. I was more worried with making sure that all those times Google says it will let you delete your personal data and/or anonymize it long-term, that they did and that whole system was working properly. People love to say Google gobbles user data forever, but when something was supposed to be deleted and wasn't, it was me and my team who got woken up at 7AM. People like to demonize large corporations, and Google has been going downhill, but the vast, vast majority of people working for Google are trying to do good work. Big corporations have this uncanny ability to behave worse and worse even when they're full of good people.
rla3rd 7y ago
with online computing where is the line drawn for employee vs employer equipment? lets say i have a personal aws account and i ssh into an ec2 instance, but use my employers laptop to access it to have the information displayed. The same can also be said for a home computing resource. Who's also paying for the electric for that equipment to be used? My employer provided laptop wouldn't run if I didn't pay my personal electric bill. I think there's likely a big gray area that hasn't been explored yet. I've not heard of any cases where any of this comes into play.
muth02446 7y ago
For reference, Google's IARC process is publicly documented here: https://opensource.google/docs/iarc/ https://opensource.google/docs/iarc/
nmeofthestate 7y ago
A fun but difficult challenge to set yourself is to try to find a stroppy Googler who doesn't have pronouns in their Twitter bio. Yes I know this will get downvoted to oblivion, but seriously - it's guaranteed.
- cjslep 7y ago
  Easy: Me.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
brendon9x 7y ago
Our lack of IP assignment waiver was red-flagged during a VC due-diligence exercise. It became a non-negotiable item, and we got all our employees to sign a waiver. Our waiver has an exclusion list similar to Google's IARC, but unlike Google we have allowed 100% of all exclusions that employees have submitted. It did seem the VCs were far more worried about a rogue former employee somehow acquiring IP rights over our core IP than stealing unrelated work from our employees. No-one has been able to explain to me how this might happen though; I suspect it's all paranoia.
- cbhl 7y ago
  > rogue former employee somehow acquiring IP rights over our core IP "Rogue ex-co-founder comes out of the woodwork X years later and claims they own half of your thing" is a horror story in startup land; see Facebook for an example of this. (The Social Network movie is a fictionalized depiction, but the real-world drama was sufficiently troublesome for Facebook that they initially weren't planning on engaging with the movie. Last minute they decided to rent a theater to take the whole company to see it, and Jesse Eisenberg started helping Mark Zuckerberg with his public speaking.)
- shantly 7y ago
  Heh. I've seen that tried once, as an employee. Not sure what the motivation was, may have been investment-related. Pretty sure not a single person signed. No harm came to us. Solidarity'll do that.
Lukesys 7y ago
Google really is Hooli...
TrackerFF 7y ago
So what's the solution / workaround? I think it's best to be honest with your employer, but if they're gonna claim stake at everything you write - well it sounds like a policy that eventually drives enterprising employees to game the system.
hobo_mark 7y ago
Speaking of which, is "20% time" still a thing at Google?
nurettin 7y ago
>> And so I resolved to give zero shits from that point on about their IP ownership policies, and did whatever I wanted in my spare time. should have done that in the beginning.
masukomi 7y ago
I've been able to alter that "we own your crap" section of every employment contract I've needed to. Don't sign. speak up. Carefully write and submit a reasonable alternative. This may be harder with megacorps... With the prior company it was basically just altering it to say they don't own anything I created prior to my employment even if i continue to work on it and that I would give them notification for new projects. This is a bit easier when your company does _one_ thing and you simply don't write any code related to that industry on your free time. Harder with a Google that does pretty much everything. In general, you have the power to alter this and your NDA, as long as your suggestions are reasonable. I find it best to use my programmer brain and simple language to write out a very precise bit of replacement language and give it to them as a suggestion of what you want. My co. just updated their NDA and I noticed my changes from when I was offered a job in the new version.
- ryandrake 7y ago
  Mind mentioning which companies? I’ve tried in all companies I’ve worked with (some FAANG, some medium sized companies) and none of them are willing to even touch terms including IP assignment clauses. Without exception it was “Sign it unmodified it GTFO!”
throwaway713 7y ago
Is California the only state in the U.S. where a company can not legally claim ownership of your side projects as long as they do not relate to company business? I will eventually move out of the Bay Area, and this is my biggest concern for a new job. Financially, I don't have enough saved up to just quit and work on a startup for a year, but I also don't want my full time employer to own a side project that ends up being successful. What is the best way to handle this? How amenable are companies outside of California to negotiating away the invention assignment clause?
xibalba 7y ago
The extremely simple and obvious solution is to just not work at Google. The fact that people accept these agreements and then disingenuously rage against them later is utterly baffling to me.
- elicash 7y ago
  Not sure if you read the thread, but this person's agreement allowed them to own their side projects. Some issues are a problem across the industry. But also, more importantly, some people like to solve problems in their workplaces and make them better.
  - xibalba 7y ago
    Indeed I did read the thread. The author's employment agreement specified that the employee would submit to a process by which Google determines what of his side work it will claim copyright on. To claim that the employment agreement allows employees to own their side work free, clear, and without Google's approval is simply not true. People's greatest asset is themselves and their time. It is most effective to deprive companies like Google of this asset (which is their lifeblood) as a means of protest and a lever of change. But I do take your point. Frankly, this thread just feels like whinging to me.
    - elicash 7y ago
      I think your response is a fair one, but the counter-argument I'd make to you is that Google is so powerful that if the employees were able to make a change that the ripple effects throughout the industry would be tremendous. As an individual, it's possible the biggest thing you can do alone is control where you spend your time. But collectively, it's possible the biggest impact of employees would be to change things on the job.
jeremysalwen 7y ago
As a couple people mentioned on the twitter thread, it is possible to negotiate this line out of your contract with Google (the one about relating to google's business). I did so with google, and also with apple.
lumberingjack 7y ago
Do we not remember the famous story where Steve Jobs and Wozniak almost had to give up Apple computers to Xerox? Some say that Xerox couldn't see the use of a personal computer and how big that could be so their own stupidity let it slide if they would have claimed wozniak's work apples computer never would have existed.
- enitihas 7y ago
  I think you meant HP. Wozniak didn't work at Xerox.
Pfhreak 7y ago
This is the reason I left Amazon. Google has IARC, at least, which provides a path for employees to retain copyright. Amazon has no such avenue, and they furthermore restrict who you can work with -- want to make a game in your spare time? You cannot do it with people who are not Amazon employees.
raphlinus 7y ago
Counterpoint: I open sourced a lot of stuff while I was at Google. There is some friction in the open source releasing and IARC policies (one of my projects got denied), but generally the open source teams at Google want you to do good work. And having clear documentation of ownership is actually helpful; there's a lot of dodgy stuff out there where you're not sure who actually has the rights. Contrast to Apple, where, aside from a few high profile open source projects that help drive their business (Webkit, Swift, llvm), open source contribution is quite discouraged. How many fun Apple side projects do you see on Github? I really enjoy the freedom now of just being able to click "create repo" whenever I feel like it, and am sad about the corporatization of the world economy, but I think Google is doing about as well as you can expect here.
- sitkack 7y ago
  You are also famous and had a big OSS presence before joining Google, you worked on Google blessed OSS software while employed there. You are in no way typical of the bullshit other folks have to go through.
  - kllrnohj 7y ago
    The Twitter OP also had his random OSS project approved in IARC and he wasn't famous. He also even says the workflow today is much more permissive than it was when he joined (aka, it's gotten better) Then again, twitter OP also is attempting to apply boolean logic to legal documents as if that whole "BUT TECHNICALLY" bullshit actually flies in court. He had a bad experience on 1 of 2 projects, decided to contribute to a 3rd knowingly violating policies (legal liability much?), got chewed out for it (but not fired or "retaliated against"), and is now ranting about that experience from many years ago on twitter.
    - marcan_42 7y ago
      I had two projects go through IARC. One was approved (after a month or two wait IIRC) explicitly because Google wants nothing to do with console hacking projects, emulators, etc. The other was a completely normal OSS project that ships in Ubuntu these days, and it was denied with no explanation or recourse. It's gotten better, but that doesn't negate my experience. I'm sharing it now, and didn't in the past, because if Google really made a mistake in their Irish contracts in favor of their employees, I didn't want to jinx it for other people. I assume the contract has changed enough by now that it doesn't matter. I also hold no grudge with Google, I left on excellent terms and otherwise enjoyed my experience there - but this IP ownership BS was one of the things that tipped the scale towards moving on to other things in my life. I was retaliated against, by being explicitly forbidden from ever actually using the relevant corporate processes that other employees enjoyed. I was lucky my contract turned out to be in my favor, or else I might have just left the company at that point. As for the Boolean logic stuff, you don't need to know what Boolean logic is to be able to read an "or" in a contract. I simply used Boolean logic to explain the subtle difference between my Irish contract and California law. No Irish judge is going to look at my contract and say "well, actually, this is CLEARLY intended to be like California law so that applies here now". The contract, as written, gave me the right to my own work as long as I didn't use company property or do it as a direct result of my work at the company. Just because I explained it in CS terms doesn't mean I'm riding on some obscure technicality.
meddlin 7y ago
Cool, I won't work for Google. Probably ever if this crap keeps up.
TimPC 7y ago
I've always thought the legal should be restricted to stuff you do in your job for the company rather than stuff the company does. I think it's fair for a company to say a person who does X for the company can't work on X in their spare time for sufficiently restrictive X (e.x. a very specific domain of expertise so not something broad like programming) where they might be jeopardizing company IP or using trade secrets to write external code. I don't think it makes sense for the company to be able to say that for everything the company does even if you have no contact with it. This creates some edge cases and challenges when the scope of your work changes but I think it's far fairer to have to hand off projects at that point than it is to have to hand off projects just for working at the company. It's a bit tricky because if a company only tangentially lets you work on something you may want to do projects to improve your expertise in that area without having to hand over all rights to said projects to the company. There is a legitimate concern about people doing near copies of their company work at home or withholding ideas in their job in order to use those ideas in a personal project. The current balance favors companies too strongly however.
kabdib 7y ago
My current employer has a standard "you own anything you do in your spare time, as long as it's not done on work equipment" clause in the contract. Quite a few people here have side projects, discussion about them is open, and the culture is that of respect for these people and the projects. I get the impression that the company likes people with the motivation and energy to engage in side projects, and practically encourages them.
- lioeters 7y ago
  It's admirable how your employer has the contract clause excluding ownership of any work you do on your own time, on your own equipment. To me, that seems like it should be the standard, common sense. I noticed Dunbar's number (~150 people) is sometimes mentioned, to attempt to explain how trust in relationships break down in large corporations. I'm curious, may I ask roughly how big your employer is?
  - kabdib 7y ago
    It should definitely be the standard. I agree, it should not even be worthwhile mentioning. It was still refreshing to see. We talk about Dunbar's number quite a bit, actually. We're about 2X that, enough for several tribes.
    - lioeters 7y ago
      Thank you for answering. I just saw your profile - seeing where you work, I feel a bit silly for so casually asking the question! The topic of company ownership/copyright on employee side projects seem even more relevant in the gaming industry, where - I imagine - there must be a lot of code/library reuse, common patterns and concepts, where side projects could easily overlap with products. On one hand, I can see that from a management/legal perspective, it could be difficult to justify the risk, especially as the company scales beyond tens or hundreds of Dunbar-sized social groups. My impression is that companies founded and managed by programmers tend to have respect and trust for the work being done, with understanding that life-long programmers (in contrast with those just doing it as a job) always have side projects going on - and that such projects are perfect playgrounds for learning, exploration of ideas, creativity and innovation.
andy_ppp 7y ago
This Joel on Software article seems relevant: https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2016/12/09/developers-side-projects/ https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2016/12/09/developers-side-pr... I totally disagree with the sentiments though and would prefer copyright to be transferred on a project by project basis. Why do businesses seem to say that it's so difficult to know what should be owned by the company you work for? Surely a well run company has a clear understanding of what a developer is working on at work. They own everything to do with that and nothing else right? And yes, if I start a search engine competitive with Google in my spare time I suspect they own the search engine, but if I start a second hand clothing app they do not! I seriously do not understand where the difficulty is in defining this?
rhacker 7y ago
It's not a problem for small projects that you don't intend to do anything interesting with. However it still sucks because you never know if some widget library you create, even if you create in secret without your name on it, suddenly makes a $1MM. What happens the name your name gets leaked that you are the main project contributor. Will some lawyer at the companies you worked on for the last 10 years be looking at monetizing your work?
julianozen 7y ago
One of the things I remember from my amazon employment is a similar draconian policy which is also overbearing due to the fact that Amazon wants to sell everything from all birds knock offs to scaleable databases. One thing I thought was particular heavy handed was that the policy also stated that in addition to general fears of amazon claiming ownership of your project, if you needed some kind of cloud service, it required you use AWS for those services.
- solidasparagus 7y ago
  It's less ridiculous than it sounds. AWS is super careful about not using competing clouds - I think because if AWS employees use other clouds, it opens AWS up to some sort of legal liability/claims of copying.
  - julianozen 7y ago
    Again, this is on a personal project.... Amazon shouldn't even have the right to claim ownership of it, yet alone be concerned about the repercussions of owning it
dehrmann 7y ago
> usbmuxd (iPhone USB comms daemon)...was rejected without an explanation This is development of a tool that helps a competitor's product. And it's not like Android was a random side project no one knew about. This, and developing an iOS app, are the border of doing work that's against Google's interests.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
LatteLazy 7y ago
People really have the knives out for Google at the moment (see also the firing of people, monopoly allegations, the fake news "controversy"). They're not perfect. But is there any major corporation that DOESN'T claim ip over employee projects during their employment? Side or otherwise.
Arathorn 7y ago
For what it's worth, this is something we've struggled with at New Vector (vector.im), the company we set up to keep the core Matrix.org dev team gainfully employed. On one hand, we don't want a nightmare where a rogue employee goes and claims that the work they did on the day job is actually their personal IP and tries to relicense or patent it somehow. On the other hand, 90% of what we do is open source and it's critical to let everyone keep hacking on their personal FOSS projects unencumbered. The current UK employment contracts try to solve it with this construct: 10.2.1 is a general "everything you do belongs to the company", and then 10.2.2 carves out "...except for stuff you do in your spare time, if it's unrelated to your dayjob work". We (happily) haven't had to try it in anger yet, but hopefully it's a reasonable enough compromise. Pretty much everyone in the UK had unilateral "everything you do belongs to the company" contracts in previous gigs, so in theory it's an improvement. --- 10.2.1 You shall give the Company full written details of all Inventions and of all works embodying Intellectual Property Rights made wholly or partially by you at any time during the course of your employment which relate to, or are reasonably capable of being used in, the business of the Company. You acknowledge that, save as set out below, all Intellectual Property Rights subsisting (or which may in the future subsist) in all such Inventions and works shall automatically, on creation, vest in the Company absolutely. To the extent that they do not vest automatically, you hold them on trust for the Company. You agree promptly to execute all documents and do all acts as may, in the opinion of the Company, be necessary to give effect to this clause 10.2. 10.2.2 The above is subject to it being agreed that Intellectual Property Rights created by you outside the reasonable scope of your work for the Company and not related to the business of the Company (provided in any case that they are created outside working hours) may be retained by you. This policy seeks to strike a balance between providing creative freedom for employees to pursue their own interests outside of work with an understanding that creations and advances which should properly be for the benefit of New Vector or Matrix will be assigned to the relevant one of them.
- marcan_42 7y ago
  The problem is "related to the business of the company". For a small company, that may seem reasonable, because the company probably only does one or two things. However, for a large company like Google, that basically means "everything". In my opinion, the right approach is to instead talk about your work duties at the company. If you work on your own time on something unrelated to your work duties, but related to someone else's at the company, you should still get to keep full rights to your work. If you weren't asked to do that work for your job, why would the company have a right to the result, even if they find they have some interest in it?
nyxxie 7y ago
Idiotic policy. Side projects are one of the best way to learn new skills (they're the entire basis for my current skillset in this industry!). I often find that I import lessons and technologies learned in my freetime to my day job as opposed to stealing niche lessons from work. This fact basically makes my side projects akin to ongoing training that my employers aren't paying for but are reaping value from. Not only is it unfair for these companies to leverage their power to try and claim ownership over side projects, but they're actively shooting themselves in the foot by discouraging a massive and free source of continuous education for their employees.
vjktyu 7y ago
Does this clause have any teeth? If I want to work on OSS in my spare time, I'll do so under a pseudonym and won't bother to ask for permissions. If I choose to make a new AGPLv3 project on GitHub, I'll just do so. And if some lawyers decide to nail me, good luck.
ksec 7y ago
I am late to this discussions not sure if I will get an answer. How is that different to Company Policy not allowing you to have a 2nd Job? i.e You can only have one Full Time Job.

738 points by zoobab 7y ago

I'd be very wary to base my legal strategy on DeMorgan. Is it inconceivable that a judge might rule that the intention is clear and a minor clerical error doesn't matter?

marcan_42 7y ago
I signed a contract, I didn't sign CA labor code which doesn't even apply within the same continent and which the contract does not reference in any way. I'm pretty sure they can't claim they get to enforce what they intended to write just because I happened to guess what that was by Googling parts of my contract. What I signed is what I signed, and the wording was clear in the contract.
- TrickyRick 7y ago
  If someone asks you to bring wine or beer to a party, do you usually bring both? Because that would still be valid in an OR statement but basing your ordinary life decisions on boolean logic doesn't always work out like you expect it. If a contract is written as: You own things you make on your own time unless you're using company equipment provided: * The thing does not relate to company business * The thing does not result from work you do for the company It's pretty clear cut what this means and a judge would not care for boolean logic. Of course it's hard to know for sure without knowing the exact wording of the contract.
  - YawningAngel 7y ago
    Yes, I think that if someone asked me to bring "wine or beer" to a party, literally everyone I know would be fine with me bringing a bit of both. In fact, what would be weird would be someone objecting to my bringing both on the grounds that they meant, but didn't say, "xor". I don't think this contract is ambiguous in natural language. Or is generally inclusive, and if you want xor you either write xor or use some cumbersome circumlocution.
    - wisienkas 7y ago
      I would call them out if they object and was to sloopy to write "either X or Y"
    - Retric 7y ago
      XOR is the natural use of or in English. Do you want to get subs or pizza? Are you going to vote for A or B? Logical OR is often written as ‘and or’. Do you want to see a movie and or get dinner? https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/And/or https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/And/or That said it’s not a universal standard and like most of English has wide regional differences.
      - YawningAngel 7y ago
        I think whether "or" means inclusive or or xor is in fact ambiguous and determined by context in English. I think if you as a megacorp write ambiguous contracts and try to enforce them against your employees, you do not deserve a sympathetic interpretation from the courts.
        kilotaras 7y ago
        In fact such interpretations of contract ambiguities (in favor of weaker party) are even codified in some countries, most notably the whole of EU [1] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contra_proferentem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contra_proferentem
      - tomtomtom777 7y ago
        That or is not really a XOR becomes clear when you negate it. I don't want subs or pizza. I am not going to vote for A or B. I would say OR is the natural use, and exclusion is implied by the context in these examples.
        Retric 7y ago
        There are plenty of examples where A and B is treated as a negation of A or B. “Do you want A or B? Why not both?” As one example from a popular mime. https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/why-not-both-why-dont-we-have-both https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/why-not-both-why-dont-we-have...
  - HelloNurse 7y ago
    > You own things you make on your own time unless you're using company equipment provided: * The thing does not relate to company business * The thing does not result from work you do for the company While "on your own time" and "using company equipment" are reasonably clear concepts, the other two clauses are too debatable to be an acceptable risk. It's not a matter of Boolean logic.
  - marcan_42 7y ago
    There was an explicit "or", it wasn't just two clauses in a list. And "or" vs "xor" doesn't make any sense here, if it were "xor" then Google would own anything you did by actual default (i.e. that had neither anything to do with Google's business nor resulted from work done for Google), which makes no sense. It is explicitly an "or" and clearly means inclusive or, not exclusive or.

petjuh 7y ago

Were those side projects done during work hours or using Google's equipment?

DigitalSea 7y ago
Some of the side projects he worked on prior to joining Google. >Like many Googlers, I had projects I worked on in my spare time. Some of those I carried over from before joining. >When I joined, I submitted two projects that I was actively working on at the time, largely just maintaining: AsbestOS (yes, those were the PS3 Linux days) and usbmuxd (iPhone USB comms daemon, you probably have it if you have Ubuntu!).
- ownagefool 7y ago
  They also said it wasn't during work hours or on googles equipment. Though, honestly, I doubt I really even agree on the equipment clause when it. When said equipment is a laptop and a phone, using their device would be more about not wanting to carry multiple devices than any interstice value gained by the equipment.
  - mamon 7y ago
    I think this restriction makes more sense in other industries, such as pharmaceuticals, where lab equipment can cost millions of dollars, so employee doing their own "side projects" on it is more real abuse of company property.
    - ownagefool 7y ago
      I'd typically agree, there is a solid argument there and the premise as a whole makes sense, I just think trivialities should be excluded, and that standard software development is fairly trivial use. Once you test such software against company owned datasets, it's a different ballgame.
Eikon 7y ago
It's crazy that the "using X company equipment" legal basis works at all in those disputes. Most of the time, "equipment" seems to mean "laptop". IHMO when "equipment" is such a commodity as a laptop, this should never even be an issue. That's like a newspaper that would claims the work of one of it's journalist who is writing books on his personal time on the basis that the book was written with a pencil he brought home from work.

RandomInteger4 7y ago

Honestly, what kind of side projects can one conceivably have working a full time job that mist often involves overtime? Let's be realistic here. Chances are you're not being a competent employee if you can manage to devote brain cells to more programming outside of work, or you're likely hyped up on the adderalls, which more than likely will lead to amphetamine psychosis in the long run.

DigitalSea 7y ago
What are you talking about? Most developers I know have side projects, I have quite a few of them and work a 40 hour per week job with a wife and kids. I love what I do, so I keep doing it outside of work hours. No drugs needed to hype me up.
_se 7y ago
Please stop projecting your own shortcomings onto other developers. It is completely possible to have meaningful side projects and many people love doing it.

anilakar 7y ago

And at-will employment turns unenforceable laws into binding contracts. Sick.

draugadrotten 7y ago

Does society accept this behaviour outside tech? Imagine that a Michelin restaurant would claim copyright on the dishes cooked by the chef in his spare time. Or that the big farm would ask for a piece of those carrots grown in the back yard.

maxerickson 7y ago
Lots of people are employed with an understanding that they won't compete with the employer. Google's stance is on the aggressive end of things, but that's where the California law is coming from.
- rs23296008n1 7y ago
  The problem with an aggressive stance is that the response is then likely combative as well. Google isn't alone in this. Plenty of other companies have the same clauses. They already know these clauses have consequences but they are trying to address real fears / visible threats of their own. All that said, <humor style=wry> I'm fairly sure unionisation and other reactive responses such as further government red tape wont bother them at all. </humor>
_trampeltier 7y ago
There are a lot of things different in the "real" world and the "software" world. Nobody would accept underwear with a build in camera, gps tracker and a microphone wo give the data to x companys. But with a cellphone (almost) everybody is ok. Also if something goes wrong with software, it's the customers problem. The customer accepted the contract with no rights for him (software AS IS, no warranty), nobody would accept a such contract in the "real" world.
- sidpatil 7y ago
  > The customer accepted the contract with no rights for him (software AS IS, no warranty) That's only specific to FOSS.
  - 7y ago

thundergolfer 7y ago

This isn't surprising, though it does suck that employees have to jump through these hoops to avoid having our work claimed by employers. The way to go is to never use company resources or company time when working on personal things and also never work on something that they'd want. Sometimes it's convenient to break the first 2 rules so it's annoying to make sure to never use my work laptop/internet/office when working on personal stuff, but it's doable. The last bit is certainly quite tricky when you're at Google but I'm at Canva (design+marketing softwares) so all of my stuff is fine. For stuff you'd like to monetise we send an email to our 'bosses' about it and they give an upfront a-OK.

clarry 7y ago
> Sometimes it's convenient to break the first 2 rules so it's annoying to make sure to never use my work laptop/internet/office when working on personal stuff, but it's doable. For me, remote work makes this very easy. My office is a bedroom in my apartment. My internet plan. I have a work laptop, strictly for work stuff, and my own laptop right next to it. I don't work on my own projects on company time, but I might on a lunch break (when I'm clocked out). (I occasionally use my own laptop to help with work stuff though -- having an extra device with an ethernet port comes in handy for tcpdumping stuff without having to try isolate the traffic I want from everything else going through the work laptop)
lonelappde 7y ago
What does a trillion dollar R&D company NOT work on?

mothsonasloth 7y ago

TRWTF is doing the IARC process. The author should have just "failed" to declare it. Then when it came for the exit interview, not mention their side projects. Keep calm and carry on.

FpUser 7y ago

I was lucky that I've always had my own projects/products and I was employed as a full time software developer only once in my life. During the hiring they brought me a contract that had this sleazy IP clause. I told them that there is no way I can sign anything like that but will be more then happy to sign simple and fair non compete clause. The employer did just that: they replaced the IP ownership clause.

wccrawford 7y ago

The tweeter admits that Google's policy has changed since then. "I guess they've realized this was a dumb policy, because under the current rules what I did was totally fine."

onli 7y ago
That's just about the process for a single off patch. Not claiming copyright on what employees do in their own free time/before starting to work at the company.

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

S_A_P 7y ago

I do software consulting sleeved through various contracting or consulting companies. All of the paperwork I have to sign tries to have a claim to any IP created at the job. I immediately red line this unless there is some sort of reasonableness to it. I don’t mind giving some percentage of IP to a company that kept me busy somewhere for a year and the Resultant IP isn’t the main focus of the engagement. They are right that it probably wouldn’t have happened if they had not given me the opportunity. Otherwise I am not going to relinquish the right rights to code written to solve a problem. Most clauses I’ve seen are in this vein. Nope. DRY.

rs23296008n1 7y ago
DRY?
- AshwinDurairaj 7y ago
  Think he means DYR, do your research.
- S_A_P 7y ago
  Dont repeat yourself. IF you have code that solves a problem, dont rewrite it at every gig...
  - rs23296008n1 7y ago
    Now thats a philosophy I both agree and disagree with. Agree: omg do i need to write this form again? Seriously just write a library already! Disagree: this problem is subtly yet incompatibly different to what I've seen and dealt with before. The library would need x,y,z but their IP demands mean I'd lose rights to my closed-source library or be forced to open source it to keep using it elsewhere.
    - S_A_P 7y ago
      I agree with you. The only absolute is that there are no absolutes. However what the practical application of DRY ends up being for me is that I have a "bag of tricks" I carry with me as well as my own "library o' repetitious programming tasks" that I look into first. Much of the time I can save a lot of time by reusing old code. I may have a bit of code that is too specific for the original purpose and get tired of the technical debt it causes, and re-write it. So in that case I am repeating myself, but its with the benefit of experience. More of a refactor than repeat.

josemanuel 7y ago

That's common practice for American companies.

kaisuketrax 7y ago

This is why the need for aliases and anonymity is crucial in these situations. Do your thing but if you value it, take necessary precautions.

onion2k 7y ago
Google could claim ownership and damages if you deliberately hid a successful side project from them. Even if they didn't find out, the risk would certainly be enough to scare off any potential investors or disrupt an exit.

cauliflower99 7y ago

Was his name Richard from 'Silicon Valley'?

vesche 7y ago

Are we really at the point where we're using 100 tweets to write what should be in a blog post?

teddyh 7y ago
To have impact, ideas need to spread. Since most people don’t blog anymore, they can’t reblog other people’s blog posts. But they can retweet other people’s tweets.
- marcan_42 7y ago
  This, pretty much. I do have a blog, but 1) it's mildly more annoying to update, 2) I have >30K Twitter followers, I assume maybe 5 people have my RSS feed in a reader somewhere, and 3) I didn't actually expect it to turn out this long, but I was already typing things up into the Twitter boxes, so shrug, and 4) Twitter seems to be the place for this sort of discussion these days; my blog doesn't even have comments. I'll use my blog for long technical posts though. Those make more sense there.
  - ghaff 7y ago
    Of course, you can/should link to the blog from Twitter. But clicking through is still some friction so Twitter alone sort of substitutes for the one or two paragraph blogpost "sketches" I used to write. (I preach creating a blog version of longer threads but I don't really do it myself in practice.)
ghaff 7y ago
I don't like it either but I understand why people do it for both the virality and the low friction of getting something written very informally out there easily. I do wish that, when people do it, they'd also compile it into a blog to give it more permanent form.
eequah9L 7y ago
We are and we have been for a while now :) I'm not a fan, but there is one interesting upside--Twitter makes it simple to react to any one of those paragraphs, and spin off another discussion. The emergent graph of reactions is much more fine-grained than what blogs allowed.

A4ET8a8uTh0 7y ago

I personally think this is just another step in a series of many reminding us that Google has become just another US corporation. And a way those grow is by finding 'efficiencies','doing more with less' and leveraging their size. It is an end of an era. Then again, Jimmy Johns was always pretty bad for the workers and attempted to have kids working there signing non-competes. Maybe we should be happy it took google so long. edit: 2 more paragraphs

microcolonel 7y ago
> Google has become just another US corporation There are many other U.S. corporations who manage to do business without betraying their employees like this.
jsolson 7y ago
> Maybe we should be happy it took google so long. If you read the thread you'll note that this policy has been around for a long time (at least the ~7 years I've been with Google). The author also notes that, in terms of open source, things have become dramatically _more_ permissive over time.
- asdfasgasdgasdg 7y ago
  Longer than me too and I've been there since the mid aughts.
  - bhelkey 7y ago
    > "Mid-aughts" refers to the first decade of a century. > https://hinative.com/en-US/questions/1300361 https://hinative.com/en-US/questions/1300361 In case anyone else is unfamiliar with this term.
- deogeo 7y ago
  That's exactly it, isn't it? Thanks to such restrictive contracts, you need Google's permission.

nullc 7y ago

At my prior company we explicitly disclaimed copyright interest in employee contributions to a long list of standard open source software which included by reference the entire OIN Linux system definition, specifically to avoid any complication related to employees contributing patches back to the open source tools they used in the course of their work (and accordingly this covered not just work done on their own time, but also contributions made the course of their work). Employees were also invited to nominate additional pieces of software fairly liberally, particularly free software that didn't overlap with the organization's central business. While promoting permissive approaches like this with other organizations I've encountered employers which seem to have a some confusion about the purposes of different parts of their agreement. E.g. an IP agreement is essentially unrelated to making sure an employee is doing their job-- so a "I don't want them spending a lot of time on that" isn't a valid reason to impinge their rights, after all they would be perfectly able to slack off by staring blankly at the coffee pot regardless of what your IP agreement says. An IP agreement should be about having a clear boundary on company property, it's not a replacement for effective management. Unless you're an operating system company (which to some extent google is, but very few of the innumerable companies that copy google's practices are), trivial fixes to widely used open source software are not good candidates for company property and are not at all candidates for it if developed on the employee's own time.

Xylakant 7y ago
I really like that approach - is there any chance to get more information about that list? Like how it was compiled and maintained, maybe even the list itself?

strenholme 7y ago

It is my understanding that there has never been a case in California where a court has said “OK, your employer owns that open source patch you made at 3am on your own laptop”. Poking around, Applied Materials, Inc. v. Advanced Micro-Fabrication Equipment comes to mind; here is a summary: https://www.arnoldporter.com/en/perspectives/publications/2009/06/ip-alert-new-decision-may-undermine-claims-to-ip__ https://www.arnoldporter.com/en/perspectives/publications/20... The only public case I know of where a company has been able to claim the open source software someone made in their own time is the Nginx case which is ongoing right now in Russia. [1] I remember a story about someone in the US (not in California) where they were asked by their employer to stop working on open source Perl code in their own spare time, but there was, as I recall, no litigation there. As for myself, I am very careful to make it clear, when signing an “inventions” clause, that I will work on MaraDNS in my own personal time while employed. I also go to a lot of effort to date stamp my open source code, and to only use versions of my open source code written before I signed the “inventions” clause for anything work related. Actually, I prefer working as an independent contractor for employers who do not burden me with an “inventions” clause. [1] The details are different: As I understand it, Igor Sysoev was given permission from his employer to work on nginx while at the job, and the legal stuff didn’t come up for well over a decade after Sysoev left Rambler, and, of course, it’s in Russia, so it’s somewhat different than the “3am commit on one’s own laptop in California” issue.

TACIXAT 7y ago
If that is the case then why is this a law? Why isn't the law more clear to reflect reality? I don't really want a gun pointed at me, regardless of whether I'm about to get shot. The threat and power structure is still there.
- pc86 7y ago
  Because there's no incentive to change the law precisely because it's never been a problem. Despite the popular narrative, legislators are typically pretty busy (a lot of this is self-inflicted, though). So striking a law that has never been enforced a certain way because it might be enforced that way isn't a very productive use of their limited time, especially when courts have ruled quite the opposite.

chillly 7y ago

"Don't be evil" is looking more and more hollow.

danielovichdk 7y ago

Don't sign a contract if you don't like its content. This can hardly come as a surprise if it is started in the employees contract

hirako2000 7y ago

The rational can't be entirely wrong. In tech, skills and ideas gained during employment help generate new ideas. Since you are paid and trained, there is this incentive to profit from everything you produce. Companies use tricks such as 'coded on the corporate hardware', 'non compete agreement' etc. Grow some common sense, do all your side project strictly outside office hours, on your own hardware, in domains that don't even remotely relate to what your employer's industries , and it will be very hard for the emplying organisation to come after you. I could inspect everything my organisation does, how they do it, then bake something up that technically outperforms it, then quit and work on marketing, again Leveraging everything I've learned, their mistakes and success. Would that be fair? On the contrary, working for an optic company and developing oil drilling optimisation methods to sell once in quit, would they even come after me? It's fair, won't trigger any suspicion or even interest in pursuing litigation.

gmac 7y ago
in domains that don't even remotely relate to what your employer's industries is hard when your employer is as big and wide-ranging as Google.

pabs3 7y ago

When I was renegotiating my contract, Software Freedom Conservancy reminded me that everything is negotiable, so I negotiated ownership of all open source code I produce for my employer in addition to the existing ownership of side projects. https://sfconservancy.org/contractpatch/ https://sfconservancy.org/contractpatch/ https://lists.sfconservancy.org/pipermail/contractpatch/2018-February/000014.html https://lists.sfconservancy.org/pipermail/contractpatch/2018...

deleted 7y ago
[deleted]

ossworkerrights 7y ago

It is time to deprive large corporations of the privilege of using open source to generate profits based on people’s free work. It is high noon for saas restrictive open source licenses. Spread the wealth along small indie devs.

tytso 7y ago

Oh, please. It's standard industry practice for companies to claim ownership of everything a software engineer comes up with, even "on their own time". The problem is it's extremely difficult to say, figure out when someone might have invented some super clever idea which can be pantented "on their own time". This was true when I worked for MIT, VA Linux, IBM, and Google. At VA Linux it was the VC's which insisted on that clause in the employee's contracts. So anyone who think this is some evidence of Google being, or becoming, evil is either seriously misinformed, or just engaging in unthinking hate of Google, or both. In fact, Google has one of the most permissive IP policies that I've seen at any company except for VA Linux Systems. The default is that the vast majority of work done by an employee can be released under an open source license. Sure, there's a process that you have to go through, and unless what you want to do intersects with work that you are doing for your team that isn't intended to be released publically, or competes with a critical company initiative, the default answer is that it will be allowed to be released. This is not true for many, if not most companies, and as a responsible open source maintainer, I make sure that people understand they have permission from their company before I accept their open source contributions. Otherwise, I would be putting them, and the project, at risk. (Note that because of this, there are many employees which are not allowed to participate in open source development, because their employers will not give them permission to release code written by an employee under an open source license, whether written "on their own time" or not.) At Google, once you get this (mostly pro forma) permission, you can work on open source projects on your own time, or on 20% time, using company laptops, or using GCE resources, etc. When I was hired at Google, my manager and I cut a deal such that I could work on Linux Kernel and community projects for 50% of my time, instead of the normal 20%. Sure, the overlap between what was good for Google and what was good for ext4/Linux was pretty broad, but Google also paid for me to travel to various conferences in Asia, Australia, Europe, etc. Also unique to Google is there is a process by which you can get permission for you to out-and-out own the work done on your own time, as opposed to Google owning it and releasing it under an open source license. If you take that option then it really has to be done on your own time, and must not use any company resources, meaning not on a company laptop, or on a company network, etc. This is rare, and I'm not aware of many other companies that give employees that option.

7y ago

fierarul 7y ago

> Oh, please. It's standard industry practice for companies to claim ownership of everything a software engineer comes up with, even "on their own time". In the US. Problem is the US is infecting the rest of the world too, especially through subsidiaries which basically just translate from English the 'standard' employment contract. I had to refuse employment in Romania since the clauses were so broad and basically illegal under Romanian law. (Of course, I had no interest in proving in court they were illegal but the contract was reviewed by an attorney on my side). So, yeah, maybe apply some logic. If the employer owns your brain 24h/day maybe the hourly rate your are getting is not such a great deal. And don't get me stared on clauses the survive the contract, including multi-year employment bans to competitors, etc. For a large multinational that basically mean you have to get a job landscaping or something because they compete with anybody would offer you a comparable job for your skills. This 'standard industry practice' should die.

q3k 7y ago
Can confirm from my experience (~10 years in the industry). I've never even heard of this practice until I applied to Google. None of the EU companies I've worked at before had anything like this. None of the EU companies I've worked at since had anything like this. It's US imperialism, nothing less.
- shadowgovt 7y ago
  I think you make an excellent point, in particular regarding the fact that this is a US-based policy. US copyright law is extremely friendly to individual creators at the expense of corporations. It makes corporations bend over backwards to avoid getting into a messy legal dispute with somebody that they've employed to create for them. This policy is so broad because if an individual Google employee were to try and claim that basically anything they came up with (including things that were, common sense dictates, done as work for Google) had been done on their own time, the burden of proof would be on Google to prove otherwise.
  - franga2000 7y ago

Yizahi 7y ago

"usbmuxd was rejected without an explanation. My follow-up email asking for clarification was ignored." Isn't it funny that Google employees themselves at least sometimes can taste how other Google "products" feel when their accounts are banned, deleted and there is zero ways to appeal such decisions?

thedaemon 7y ago
What's really funny to me is Google trying to claim copyright on a GPL project.
- thedaemon 7y ago
  Downvoted for facts?
TACIXAT 7y ago
I think most Google employees are aware of that problem and wish there was a better support structure in place. They aren't paid 300k per year to deal with some random account request though, they are paid to write systems that deal with one billion accounts, so there is not much opportunity there. Until the tech giants hire massive support workforces, this isn't something engineers can do anything about.
- Yizahi 7y ago
  Well someone did wrote all those automated banhammer scripts, right? I don't think DMCA requires automated ban system, Google invented it voluntarily.
  - marcan_42 7y ago
    Hey, I had nothing to do with Content ID. I was more worried with making sure that all those times Google says it will let you delete your personal data and/or anonymize it long-term, that they did and that whole system was working properly. People love to say Google gobbles user data forever, but when something was supposed to be deleted and wasn't, it was me and my team who got woken up at 7AM. People like to demonize large corporations, and Google has been going downhill, but the vast, vast majority of people working for Google are trying to do good work. Big corporations have this uncanny ability to behave worse and worse even when they're full of good people.

rla3rd 7y ago

with online computing where is the line drawn for employee vs employer equipment? lets say i have a personal aws account and i ssh into an ec2 instance, but use my employers laptop to access it to have the information displayed. The same can also be said for a home computing resource. Who's also paying for the electric for that equipment to be used? My employer provided laptop wouldn't run if I didn't pay my personal electric bill. I think there's likely a big gray area that hasn't been explored yet. I've not heard of any cases where any of this comes into play.

muth02446 7y ago

For reference, Google's IARC process is publicly documented here: https://opensource.google/docs/iarc/ https://opensource.google/docs/iarc/

nmeofthestate 7y ago

A fun but difficult challenge to set yourself is to try to find a stroppy Googler who doesn't have pronouns in their Twitter bio. Yes I know this will get downvoted to oblivion, but seriously - it's guaranteed.

cjslep 7y ago
Easy: Me.

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

brendon9x 7y ago

Our lack of IP assignment waiver was red-flagged during a VC due-diligence exercise. It became a non-negotiable item, and we got all our employees to sign a waiver. Our waiver has an exclusion list similar to Google's IARC, but unlike Google we have allowed 100% of all exclusions that employees have submitted. It did seem the VCs were far more worried about a rogue former employee somehow acquiring IP rights over our core IP than stealing unrelated work from our employees. No-one has been able to explain to me how this might happen though; I suspect it's all paranoia.

cbhl 7y ago
> rogue former employee somehow acquiring IP rights over our core IP "Rogue ex-co-founder comes out of the woodwork X years later and claims they own half of your thing" is a horror story in startup land; see Facebook for an example of this. (The Social Network movie is a fictionalized depiction, but the real-world drama was sufficiently troublesome for Facebook that they initially weren't planning on engaging with the movie. Last minute they decided to rent a theater to take the whole company to see it, and Jesse Eisenberg started helping Mark Zuckerberg with his public speaking.)
shantly 7y ago
Heh. I've seen that tried once, as an employee. Not sure what the motivation was, may have been investment-related. Pretty sure not a single person signed. No harm came to us. Solidarity'll do that.

Lukesys 7y ago

Google really is Hooli...

TrackerFF 7y ago

So what's the solution / workaround? I think it's best to be honest with your employer, but if they're gonna claim stake at everything you write - well it sounds like a policy that eventually drives enterprising employees to game the system.

hobo_mark 7y ago

Speaking of which, is "20% time" still a thing at Google?

nurettin 7y ago

>> And so I resolved to give zero shits from that point on about their IP ownership policies, and did whatever I wanted in my spare time. should have done that in the beginning.

masukomi 7y ago

I've been able to alter that "we own your crap" section of every employment contract I've needed to. Don't sign. speak up. Carefully write and submit a reasonable alternative. This may be harder with megacorps... With the prior company it was basically just altering it to say they don't own anything I created prior to my employment even if i continue to work on it and that I would give them notification for new projects. This is a bit easier when your company does _one_ thing and you simply don't write any code related to that industry on your free time. Harder with a Google that does pretty much everything. In general, you have the power to alter this and your NDA, as long as your suggestions are reasonable. I find it best to use my programmer brain and simple language to write out a very precise bit of replacement language and give it to them as a suggestion of what you want. My co. just updated their NDA and I noticed my changes from when I was offered a job in the new version.

ryandrake 7y ago
Mind mentioning which companies? I’ve tried in all companies I’ve worked with (some FAANG, some medium sized companies) and none of them are willing to even touch terms including IP assignment clauses. Without exception it was “Sign it unmodified it GTFO!”

throwaway713 7y ago

Is California the only state in the U.S. where a company can not legally claim ownership of your side projects as long as they do not relate to company business? I will eventually move out of the Bay Area, and this is my biggest concern for a new job. Financially, I don't have enough saved up to just quit and work on a startup for a year, but I also don't want my full time employer to own a side project that ends up being successful. What is the best way to handle this? How amenable are companies outside of California to negotiating away the invention assignment clause?

xibalba 7y ago

The extremely simple and obvious solution is to just not work at Google. The fact that people accept these agreements and then disingenuously rage against them later is utterly baffling to me.

elicash 7y ago
Not sure if you read the thread, but this person's agreement allowed them to own their side projects. Some issues are a problem across the industry. But also, more importantly, some people like to solve problems in their workplaces and make them better.
- xibalba 7y ago
  Indeed I did read the thread. The author's employment agreement specified that the employee would submit to a process by which Google determines what of his side work it will claim copyright on. To claim that the employment agreement allows employees to own their side work free, clear, and without Google's approval is simply not true. People's greatest asset is themselves and their time. It is most effective to deprive companies like Google of this asset (which is their lifeblood) as a means of protest and a lever of change. But I do take your point. Frankly, this thread just feels like whinging to me.
  - elicash 7y ago
    I think your response is a fair one, but the counter-argument I'd make to you is that Google is so powerful that if the employees were able to make a change that the ripple effects throughout the industry would be tremendous. As an individual, it's possible the biggest thing you can do alone is control where you spend your time. But collectively, it's possible the biggest impact of employees would be to change things on the job.

jeremysalwen 7y ago

As a couple people mentioned on the twitter thread, it is possible to negotiate this line out of your contract with Google (the one about relating to google's business). I did so with google, and also with apple.

lumberingjack 7y ago

Do we not remember the famous story where Steve Jobs and Wozniak almost had to give up Apple computers to Xerox? Some say that Xerox couldn't see the use of a personal computer and how big that could be so their own stupidity let it slide if they would have claimed wozniak's work apples computer never would have existed.

enitihas 7y ago
I think you meant HP. Wozniak didn't work at Xerox.

Pfhreak 7y ago

This is the reason I left Amazon. Google has IARC, at least, which provides a path for employees to retain copyright. Amazon has no such avenue, and they furthermore restrict who you can work with -- want to make a game in your spare time? You cannot do it with people who are not Amazon employees.

raphlinus 7y ago

Counterpoint: I open sourced a lot of stuff while I was at Google. There is some friction in the open source releasing and IARC policies (one of my projects got denied), but generally the open source teams at Google want you to do good work. And having clear documentation of ownership is actually helpful; there's a lot of dodgy stuff out there where you're not sure who actually has the rights. Contrast to Apple, where, aside from a few high profile open source projects that help drive their business (Webkit, Swift, llvm), open source contribution is quite discouraged. How many fun Apple side projects do you see on Github? I really enjoy the freedom now of just being able to click "create repo" whenever I feel like it, and am sad about the corporatization of the world economy, but I think Google is doing about as well as you can expect here.

sitkack 7y ago
You are also famous and had a big OSS presence before joining Google, you worked on Google blessed OSS software while employed there. You are in no way typical of the bullshit other folks have to go through.
- kllrnohj 7y ago
  The Twitter OP also had his random OSS project approved in IARC and he wasn't famous. He also even says the workflow today is much more permissive than it was when he joined (aka, it's gotten better) Then again, twitter OP also is attempting to apply boolean logic to legal documents as if that whole "BUT TECHNICALLY" bullshit actually flies in court. He had a bad experience on 1 of 2 projects, decided to contribute to a 3rd knowingly violating policies (legal liability much?), got chewed out for it (but not fired or "retaliated against"), and is now ranting about that experience from many years ago on twitter.
  - marcan_42 7y ago
    I had two projects go through IARC. One was approved (after a month or two wait IIRC) explicitly because Google wants nothing to do with console hacking projects, emulators, etc. The other was a completely normal OSS project that ships in Ubuntu these days, and it was denied with no explanation or recourse. It's gotten better, but that doesn't negate my experience. I'm sharing it now, and didn't in the past, because if Google really made a mistake in their Irish contracts in favor of their employees, I didn't want to jinx it for other people. I assume the contract has changed enough by now that it doesn't matter. I also hold no grudge with Google, I left on excellent terms and otherwise enjoyed my experience there - but this IP ownership BS was one of the things that tipped the scale towards moving on to other things in my life. I was retaliated against, by being explicitly forbidden from ever actually using the relevant corporate processes that other employees enjoyed. I was lucky my contract turned out to be in my favor, or else I might have just left the company at that point. As for the Boolean logic stuff, you don't need to know what Boolean logic is to be able to read an "or" in a contract. I simply used Boolean logic to explain the subtle difference between my Irish contract and California law. No Irish judge is going to look at my contract and say "well, actually, this is CLEARLY intended to be like California law so that applies here now". The contract, as written, gave me the right to my own work as long as I didn't use company property or do it as a direct result of my work at the company. Just because I explained it in CS terms doesn't mean I'm riding on some obscure technicality.

meddlin 7y ago

Cool, I won't work for Google. Probably ever if this crap keeps up.

TimPC 7y ago

I've always thought the legal should be restricted to stuff you do in your job for the company rather than stuff the company does. I think it's fair for a company to say a person who does X for the company can't work on X in their spare time for sufficiently restrictive X (e.x. a very specific domain of expertise so not something broad like programming) where they might be jeopardizing company IP or using trade secrets to write external code. I don't think it makes sense for the company to be able to say that for everything the company does even if you have no contact with it. This creates some edge cases and challenges when the scope of your work changes but I think it's far fairer to have to hand off projects at that point than it is to have to hand off projects just for working at the company. It's a bit tricky because if a company only tangentially lets you work on something you may want to do projects to improve your expertise in that area without having to hand over all rights to said projects to the company. There is a legitimate concern about people doing near copies of their company work at home or withholding ideas in their job in order to use those ideas in a personal project. The current balance favors companies too strongly however.

kabdib 7y ago

My current employer has a standard "you own anything you do in your spare time, as long as it's not done on work equipment" clause in the contract. Quite a few people here have side projects, discussion about them is open, and the culture is that of respect for these people and the projects. I get the impression that the company likes people with the motivation and energy to engage in side projects, and practically encourages them.

lioeters 7y ago
It's admirable how your employer has the contract clause excluding ownership of any work you do on your own time, on your own equipment. To me, that seems like it should be the standard, common sense. I noticed Dunbar's number (~150 people) is sometimes mentioned, to attempt to explain how trust in relationships break down in large corporations. I'm curious, may I ask roughly how big your employer is?
- kabdib 7y ago
  It should definitely be the standard. I agree, it should not even be worthwhile mentioning. It was still refreshing to see. We talk about Dunbar's number quite a bit, actually. We're about 2X that, enough for several tribes.
  - lioeters 7y ago
    Thank you for answering. I just saw your profile - seeing where you work, I feel a bit silly for so casually asking the question! The topic of company ownership/copyright on employee side projects seem even more relevant in the gaming industry, where - I imagine - there must be a lot of code/library reuse, common patterns and concepts, where side projects could easily overlap with products. On one hand, I can see that from a management/legal perspective, it could be difficult to justify the risk, especially as the company scales beyond tens or hundreds of Dunbar-sized social groups. My impression is that companies founded and managed by programmers tend to have respect and trust for the work being done, with understanding that life-long programmers (in contrast with those just doing it as a job) always have side projects going on - and that such projects are perfect playgrounds for learning, exploration of ideas, creativity and innovation.

andy_ppp 7y ago

This Joel on Software article seems relevant: https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2016/12/09/developers-side-projects/ https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2016/12/09/developers-side-pr... I totally disagree with the sentiments though and would prefer copyright to be transferred on a project by project basis. Why do businesses seem to say that it's so difficult to know what should be owned by the company you work for? Surely a well run company has a clear understanding of what a developer is working on at work. They own everything to do with that and nothing else right? And yes, if I start a search engine competitive with Google in my spare time I suspect they own the search engine, but if I start a second hand clothing app they do not! I seriously do not understand where the difficulty is in defining this?

rhacker 7y ago

It's not a problem for small projects that you don't intend to do anything interesting with. However it still sucks because you never know if some widget library you create, even if you create in secret without your name on it, suddenly makes a $1MM. What happens the name your name gets leaked that you are the main project contributor. Will some lawyer at the companies you worked on for the last 10 years be looking at monetizing your work?

julianozen 7y ago

One of the things I remember from my amazon employment is a similar draconian policy which is also overbearing due to the fact that Amazon wants to sell everything from all birds knock offs to scaleable databases. One thing I thought was particular heavy handed was that the policy also stated that in addition to general fears of amazon claiming ownership of your project, if you needed some kind of cloud service, it required you use AWS for those services.

solidasparagus 7y ago
It's less ridiculous than it sounds. AWS is super careful about not using competing clouds - I think because if AWS employees use other clouds, it opens AWS up to some sort of legal liability/claims of copying.
- julianozen 7y ago
  Again, this is on a personal project.... Amazon shouldn't even have the right to claim ownership of it, yet alone be concerned about the repercussions of owning it

dehrmann 7y ago

> usbmuxd (iPhone USB comms daemon)...was rejected without an explanation This is development of a tool that helps a competitor's product. And it's not like Android was a random side project no one knew about. This, and developing an iOS app, are the border of doing work that's against Google's interests.

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

LatteLazy 7y ago

People really have the knives out for Google at the moment (see also the firing of people, monopoly allegations, the fake news "controversy"). They're not perfect. But is there any major corporation that DOESN'T claim ip over employee projects during their employment? Side or otherwise.

Arathorn 7y ago

For what it's worth, this is something we've struggled with at New Vector (vector.im), the company we set up to keep the core Matrix.org dev team gainfully employed. On one hand, we don't want a nightmare where a rogue employee goes and claims that the work they did on the day job is actually their personal IP and tries to relicense or patent it somehow. On the other hand, 90% of what we do is open source and it's critical to let everyone keep hacking on their personal FOSS projects unencumbered. The current UK employment contracts try to solve it with this construct: 10.2.1 is a general "everything you do belongs to the company", and then 10.2.2 carves out "...except for stuff you do in your spare time, if it's unrelated to your dayjob work". We (happily) haven't had to try it in anger yet, but hopefully it's a reasonable enough compromise. Pretty much everyone in the UK had unilateral "everything you do belongs to the company" contracts in previous gigs, so in theory it's an improvement. --- 10.2.1 You shall give the Company full written details of all Inventions and of all works embodying Intellectual Property Rights made wholly or partially by you at any time during the course of your employment which relate to, or are reasonably capable of being used in, the business of the Company. You acknowledge that, save as set out below, all Intellectual Property Rights subsisting (or which may in the future subsist) in all such Inventions and works shall automatically, on creation, vest in the Company absolutely. To the extent that they do not vest automatically, you hold them on trust for the Company. You agree promptly to execute all documents and do all acts as may, in the opinion of the Company, be necessary to give effect to this clause 10.2. 10.2.2 The above is subject to it being agreed that Intellectual Property Rights created by you outside the reasonable scope of your work for the Company and not related to the business of the Company (provided in any case that they are created outside working hours) may be retained by you. This policy seeks to strike a balance between providing creative freedom for employees to pursue their own interests outside of work with an understanding that creations and advances which should properly be for the benefit of New Vector or Matrix will be assigned to the relevant one of them.

marcan_42 7y ago
The problem is "related to the business of the company". For a small company, that may seem reasonable, because the company probably only does one or two things. However, for a large company like Google, that basically means "everything". In my opinion, the right approach is to instead talk about your work duties at the company. If you work on your own time on something unrelated to your work duties, but related to someone else's at the company, you should still get to keep full rights to your work. If you weren't asked to do that work for your job, why would the company have a right to the result, even if they find they have some interest in it?

nyxxie 7y ago

Idiotic policy. Side projects are one of the best way to learn new skills (they're the entire basis for my current skillset in this industry!). I often find that I import lessons and technologies learned in my freetime to my day job as opposed to stealing niche lessons from work. This fact basically makes my side projects akin to ongoing training that my employers aren't paying for but are reaping value from. Not only is it unfair for these companies to leverage their power to try and claim ownership over side projects, but they're actively shooting themselves in the foot by discouraging a massive and free source of continuous education for their employees.

vjktyu 7y ago

Does this clause have any teeth? If I want to work on OSS in my spare time, I'll do so under a pseudonym and won't bother to ask for permissions. If I choose to make a new AGPLv3 project on GitHub, I'll just do so. And if some lawyers decide to nail me, good luck.

ksec 7y ago

I am late to this discussions not sure if I will get an answer. How is that different to Company Policy not allowing you to have a 2nd Job? i.e You can only have one Full Time Job.