Their argument seems to be that "California law allows us to do it", and "it's protecting us from employees creating competing products". The problem I see wit

Their argument seems to be that "California law allows us to do it", and "it's protecting us from employees creating competing products". The problem I see with that is 1) They don't have to do everything they're legally allowed to in a contract as long as they aren't breaking the law. 2) It's disingenuous to spin this as somehow protecting employees. They just want people to make use of their process so that they get to arbitrarily decide whether they own something or not. If employees were really interested in exercising their legal rights, they could ignore the IARC and work on it on their own time anyway, and if Google wanted to, they could try suing the employee to get the copyright transferred. In practice, that makes them look bad, so they have the IARC process instead, which makes it easier for them to pressure employees into assigning things to Google, even if it wouldn't stand up in court.