A friend of mine had to put his PhD on hold when his company was acquired by Oracle, who tried to force him into signing "their standard employment contract" wh

A friend of mine had to put his PhD on hold when his company was acquired by Oracle, who tried to force him into signing "their standard employment contract" which effectively granted them ownership to everything he thought while employed by them. It took 3 or 4 months and 5 or 6 levels of management above his new boss before getting "an extraordinary one-off exemption" to allow him to finish thinking/writing his thesis and allow the university to publish it (as required by the terms of completing the PhD...) Everyone was _pretty_ sure that would have been unenforceable here in Australia - but that there's a serious practical difference between what is and isn't enforceable in contracts, and going up against Oracle's legal team even when they're on the wrong side of the law. So he just "stopped thinking" for several months until he (temporarily) had written permission to think non-Oracle thoughts...