Thank you. "We own everything you do" is absolutely not standard practice, even in the US, and we shouldn't do Google's work for them by pretending it is. The l

Thank you. "We own everything you do" is absolutely not standard practice, even in the US, and we shouldn't do Google's work for them by pretending it is. The linked Twitter thread says Google "tries to appropriate" everything you do, which is a very different claim. I've seen "we own everything" asserted exactly once, in a laughably bad "Whartonite seeks code monkey" contract. Meanwhile, "you own unrelated work done on your own time, without company resources" is not at all unique to Google; it's been in every other IP ownership clause I've ever read. Many of them don't even require "a process by which you can get permission". They might require disclosure, or encourage you to talk to Legal if there's an appearance of overlap, but if you write thermostat software at work you can go make Flappy Bird at home without asking anyone for permission. What's actually common, and what Google does, is claiming ownership of anything touching not only resources but the company's business. In the narrowest cases this is completely understandable: Mongo/10gen doesn't want employees to notice a Mongo pain point at work, then instead of mentioning it go home and build a product they know will have eager customers. And a bit more broadly, companies don't want their staff punching the clock, then going home and building a competitor with the experience they gained at work. But of course, companies have no real incentive to stop at what's reasonable: they'd like to own what you make, or capture all of your creative energy, so they commonly say "you can't make anything in our same industry". Amazon is infamous for attempting to claim "a connection with a cofounder" as a company resource and so claim anything made by ex-Amazon teams. (Which is only infamous because "we own everything" isn't common - if it were then Amazon's policy would look lenient.) As you say, Google is doing the same thing, it's just that they do everything and they're just limiting ownership to the employee's scope of business. Maybe you work on Gmail, but Google owns Nest, so they can claim your smart home project. It's not a standard level of restriction, it's aggressive and probably unenforceable.