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Depends where you live. In California, there are limits to what your employer can force you to assign to them. Roughly speaking, if you do it on your own time a
by gnicholas 4y ago
Depends where you live. In California, there are limits to what your employer can force you to assign to them. Roughly speaking, if you do it on your own time and with your own equipment, and it doesn't relate to your employer's current/predicted business, it's yours. [1]
Whether or not you're in CA, you should consider speaking to an employment lawyer in your jurisdiction to find out the relevant details.
1: https://law.justia.com/codes/california/2011/lab/division-3/2870-2872/2870 https://law.justia.com/codes/california/2011/lab/division-3/...
- ISL 4y agoWashington State carves out exceptions too. In addition to regulatory exceptions, some companies have policies where you can check in with the company to see if they would like to assert their IP rights over your work. If you work at a computer chip manufacturer and you decide you'd like to moonlight developing robots that make nacho-cheese chips, there's a pretty good chance that HR will be willing to give you a written document waiving their IP assignment in a narrowly-tailored way. I have successfully taken that approach in order to preserve my IP rights to continue my academic work and collaborations as I entered industry in an unrelated field.
- spoonjim 4y agoOne of the weaknesses of this is that if you work at a company like Microsoft or Google that does pretty much everything, you’re fucked