9 ms·

> Anything you do with the company property, e.g., work computer, automatically belongs to the company, even if you do it on the weekends. That doesn't sound u

by oytis 4y ago

> Anything you do with the company property, e.g., work computer, automatically belongs to the company, even if you do it on the weekends. That doesn't sound unacceptable to me. It's not that I'm that strict about e.g. reading personal emails etc. on my work computer, but if it's some side hustle, be it for money or for fun, I think it's honest to take your personal machine for that.

amelius 4y ago
Computers are just office equipment, just like pens. If I gave you a pen and you wrote some story with it, then could I claim the rights to that story? I think not.
- 7steps2much 4y ago
  If you make that pen available to me under these conditions? Sure. If you "just give" me something without any conditions then no, you could definitely not claim that story. But if you make that pen, your property, available to me explicitly only for work and nothing else? It's your property, not mine. I only have whatever rights you grant me to it.
  - VeninVidiaVicii 4y ago
    Only if you sign the contract!
    - munchler 4y ago
      You don’t get the pen without signing the contract.
      - VeninVidiaVicii 4y ago
        You can’t sign the contract without the pen.
  - amelius 4y ago
    Let's make this example a little more extreme to show how nonsensical a company claim is on stuff they did not create (or pay for). If I used the company computer to access a dating-website, then could the company claim ownership of my firstborn child, if that was in the contract?
    - riskable 4y ago
      > If I used the company computer to access a dating-website, then could the company claim ownership of my firstborn child No, but first kiss is definitely on the table.
  - nhchris 4y ago
    > If you make that pen available to me under these conditions? Sure. Let's leave aside whether the law (in whatever country) permits such a one-sided contract, and ask - should it permit it? There are plenty of contract terms that are illegal (i.e. not backed by law), such as usury [1] or various anti-competitive practices, because their enforcement is seen as either unfair, or a detriment to society, regardless of whether they were entered freely. Contracts are not and should not be above the law. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usury#Usury_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usury#Usury_law
    - 7steps2much 4y ago
      > because their enforcement is seen as either unfair, or a detriment to society I mean, I do agree with you in general, its just that I do not see this issue as a detriment to society. If someone demands massive interest rates on loans that you need to survive thats definitely unethical. A company demanding that you do not use their laptop so that you can work on your side projects at home ... well, that doesn't quite sound as bad. There is nothing stopping you from just buying your own device. Thats like saying "only use the company car for work stuff" ... it just doesn't seem that unfair or unethical to me to be honest.
- oytis 4y ago
  That's why they write it in contracts explicitly I guess?
  - amelius 4y ago
    Not everything in contracts is legally binding. If I write code using some company computer, then the most they could do is charge me for the damages, i.e. the power used or in the worst case I would have to replace the computer.
    - oytis 4y ago
      Yeah, I'm not competent there. My impression is it should be enforceable, at least in the U.S., but I'd contact a lawyer if I wanted to know for sure.
- rintakumpu 4y ago
  Exactly this, and they are ubiquitous. With software I think it might be a slightly different matter as the company mighy have access to software you couldn't otherwise afford. But it's a red flag anyways ... why would you ever want to work for someone who'd want to claim ownership to something that is clearly not theirs?
- rubyfan 4y ago
  If you explicitly included a contract that stated how the pen was to be used and the ramifications before my acceptance of your pen then yes. Companies do include policies about how their equipment is to be used and for what and they do include how they think about ownership usually in your employment agreement or principles of employment policies. To write those off because “hey it’s only a generic piece of equipment” is perilous. I suspect how you think about the analogy changes if you write the story on company letterhead or if you used the company car for your catering side hustle on the weekends.
  - etothepii 4y ago
    This is usually a tax thing. We have a policy that states, "company equipment can not be used for personal use". As without this company equipment can not be tax deductible. However, in the UK at least, it is a matter of economic policy whether a company makes any effort to in-force. Thus I hit on what a I thought was a neat solution. Which was to deem it a sackable offence to expend any resource whatsoever including time or materials to identify if company property had been so used.
  - amelius 4y ago
    It's not that simple. The law recognizes that when signing a contract there is a power-imbalance between employer and employee. It would be different if the contract was written by the employee and signed by the employer.
  - BeFlatXIII 4y ago
    That last paragraph of yours is key the your whole post. It’s a good illustration of how a large enough difference in degree becomes a difference in kind.
    - amelius 4y ago
      If you use the company car for a side hustle in catering, then that perhaps gives the company the right to fire you or charge you for damages. However, they do not get to claim any intellectual property (recipes you invented for your catering side-job).
- eloff 4y ago
  Strangely it works this way though. It doesn’t make sense. In my current job I refused company equipment, and insisted on using my own. I pay for my own software too. Safer that way.
- kaashif 4y ago
  I don't know whether you could or couldn't. But if I entered into such a contract, I'd obviously use a different pen, it's not that hard. Is anyone really running their side businesses from their work laptops? That seems crazy to me.
- wepple 4y ago
  I disagree. A vanilla MacBook might be a bit like a pen, but if that MacBook is loaded with a bunch of proprietary or licensed software, I can see why an organization wouldn’t want it being used for financial gain outside of the organization. Perhaps they don’t explicitly “lose” anything, but it’s their investment to have returns on. If a laptop is like a pen, what about a high end graphics workstation? What about a small server? Internet bandwidth is a cheap commodity, can I run my site from work? Electricity is basically free (I charge my personal scooter at work), what about a small Bitcoin miner?
- II2II 4y ago
  So you're the one who keeps taking the company's pens ... More seriously though, there are frequently restictions of the use of office equipment (or business equipment in general). Businesses will often overlook it if it is not a problem, say if you need a photocopy of a rental contract. They have the discretion to say no if the privilege is being abused, say if you started printing hundreds of pages a month for personal use. The misuse of pens is rarely seen as an issue since they hold little intrinsic value and are routinely replaced. Should they be able to claim the rights to something you produced with their equipment? In most cases, no. I'm not going to say in all cases no since there is always going to be someone who pushes the limits beyond reason. (Say a person develops a piece of software with a company computer to sell on the side. Can that be construed as the business indirectly financing the development of the software by providing hardware and/or software tools?) In general, it is always a good idea to do personal stuff with personal equipment and business stuff with equipment supplied by the business. I'm sure the coworkers who are searching for the missing pens will thank you for doing so.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
j01 4y ago
I think it's fine to require that you cannot use work equipment for personal projects, but claiming ownership of a project written on the weekend on a company laptop isn't the solution.
tjoff 4y ago
So now I have to lug around two of everything (laptop, phone etc) just because I might want to do something unrelated to work? It is completely unreasonable as a blanket statement.
- NikolaNovak 4y ago
  Three. My employer's laptop, my current client's laptop (I'm in a consulting branch of a large corporation), and my personal laptop. Pre-Covid I lugged them on airplanes every week. I enjoy HN for many reasons, one of which is to encounter approaches and perspectives that I would not ever even remotely consider. I would not use my employer's laptop for personal, let alone a side-gig purpose, with a 10 foot pole. It's not mine, I have no control of it, I have no visibility into what is being monitored nor how it is used, where the data goes, what I should install on it, etc. Employer has full legal right to request it back this evening, do whatever forensic examinations they want, and have interesting questions or claims on anything they find. Yes laptop is a tool, but it's such a complex multipurpose massively powerful dangerous tool, that even if we try to make a claim "Pen and Laptop are legally the same as a employer-provided-tool", I find the surface area of a Pen minuscule compared to the surface area of a laptop and everything I can do with it / put on it.
  - wepple 4y ago
    Big +1 on that. I assume a model where my work laptop screen is being directly mirrored into a room with 100 people watching it 24x7, basically. Entirely impossible, but every organization has some level of monitoring between zero and my theoretical scenario, so I carry a personal device and completely sidestep the entire issue.
    - tjoff 4y ago
      And I've setup everything from scratch. There is no software on there that I wouldn't install on my personal machine. If anyone wanted access to it they'd have to ask me for a password noone else knows. Yes, it is perfectly reasonable and in many cases prudent to not use your companies laptop for home-use. So you may chose not to do it. That the company would own everything you did on it is still completely unreasonable.
Turing_Machine 4y ago
Another wrinkle on "company property" you have to watch out for: When I was in grad school, a professor in my department left to take a job at another university. The beancounters demanded the return of the department-issued computer he'd had...in 1985. Of course, that was many, many computers ago, and what almost certainly happened was that he'd transferred the machine to a grad student or whatever when he got a new one, and they'd just lost the record of the transfer (or never entered it in the first place). Still, he had to go through a week or so of back and forth before they were convinced that a) it was unreasonable to expect him to account for a computer from decades ago and b) even if he did still have the 1985 computer, it wouldn't be worth anything like their book value any more. They actually wanted to charge him the original 1985 price for the "missing" computer! I guess the moral there is to keep your own careful log of what happens to any company property that's been issued to you.
- buildbot 4y ago
  When I worked in tech support at my University, we 100% knew we were never getting it back but had to ask like once a year anyway because government. Public money means excessive tracing for any asset!!

by oytis 4y ago

amelius 4y ago

Computers are just office equipment, just like pens. If I gave you a pen and you wrote some story with it, then could I claim the rights to that story? I think not.

7steps2much 4y ago
If you make that pen available to me under these conditions? Sure. If you "just give" me something without any conditions then no, you could definitely not claim that story. But if you make that pen, your property, available to me explicitly only for work and nothing else? It's your property, not mine. I only have whatever rights you grant me to it.
- VeninVidiaVicii 4y ago
  Only if you sign the contract!
  - munchler 4y ago
    You don’t get the pen without signing the contract.
    - VeninVidiaVicii 4y ago
      You can’t sign the contract without the pen.
- amelius 4y ago
  Let's make this example a little more extreme to show how nonsensical a company claim is on stuff they did not create (or pay for). If I used the company computer to access a dating-website, then could the company claim ownership of my firstborn child, if that was in the contract?
  - riskable 4y ago
    > If I used the company computer to access a dating-website, then could the company claim ownership of my firstborn child No, but first kiss is definitely on the table.
- nhchris 4y ago
  > If you make that pen available to me under these conditions? Sure. Let's leave aside whether the law (in whatever country) permits such a one-sided contract, and ask - should it permit it? There are plenty of contract terms that are illegal (i.e. not backed by law), such as usury [1] or various anti-competitive practices, because their enforcement is seen as either unfair, or a detriment to society, regardless of whether they were entered freely. Contracts are not and should not be above the law. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usury#Usury_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usury#Usury_law
  - 7steps2much 4y ago
    > because their enforcement is seen as either unfair, or a detriment to society I mean, I do agree with you in general, its just that I do not see this issue as a detriment to society. If someone demands massive interest rates on loans that you need to survive thats definitely unethical. A company demanding that you do not use their laptop so that you can work on your side projects at home ... well, that doesn't quite sound as bad. There is nothing stopping you from just buying your own device. Thats like saying "only use the company car for work stuff" ... it just doesn't seem that unfair or unethical to me to be honest.
oytis 4y ago
That's why they write it in contracts explicitly I guess?
- amelius 4y ago
  Not everything in contracts is legally binding. If I write code using some company computer, then the most they could do is charge me for the damages, i.e. the power used or in the worst case I would have to replace the computer.
  - oytis 4y ago
    Yeah, I'm not competent there. My impression is it should be enforceable, at least in the U.S., but I'd contact a lawyer if I wanted to know for sure.
rintakumpu 4y ago
Exactly this, and they are ubiquitous. With software I think it might be a slightly different matter as the company mighy have access to software you couldn't otherwise afford. But it's a red flag anyways ... why would you ever want to work for someone who'd want to claim ownership to something that is clearly not theirs?
rubyfan 4y ago
If you explicitly included a contract that stated how the pen was to be used and the ramifications before my acceptance of your pen then yes. Companies do include policies about how their equipment is to be used and for what and they do include how they think about ownership usually in your employment agreement or principles of employment policies. To write those off because “hey it’s only a generic piece of equipment” is perilous. I suspect how you think about the analogy changes if you write the story on company letterhead or if you used the company car for your catering side hustle on the weekends.
- etothepii 4y ago
  This is usually a tax thing. We have a policy that states, "company equipment can not be used for personal use". As without this company equipment can not be tax deductible. However, in the UK at least, it is a matter of economic policy whether a company makes any effort to in-force. Thus I hit on what a I thought was a neat solution. Which was to deem it a sackable offence to expend any resource whatsoever including time or materials to identify if company property had been so used.
- amelius 4y ago
  It's not that simple. The law recognizes that when signing a contract there is a power-imbalance between employer and employee. It would be different if the contract was written by the employee and signed by the employer.
- BeFlatXIII 4y ago
  That last paragraph of yours is key the your whole post. It’s a good illustration of how a large enough difference in degree becomes a difference in kind.
  - amelius 4y ago
    If you use the company car for a side hustle in catering, then that perhaps gives the company the right to fire you or charge you for damages. However, they do not get to claim any intellectual property (recipes you invented for your catering side-job).
eloff 4y ago
Strangely it works this way though. It doesn’t make sense. In my current job I refused company equipment, and insisted on using my own. I pay for my own software too. Safer that way.
kaashif 4y ago
I don't know whether you could or couldn't. But if I entered into such a contract, I'd obviously use a different pen, it's not that hard. Is anyone really running their side businesses from their work laptops? That seems crazy to me.
wepple 4y ago
I disagree. A vanilla MacBook might be a bit like a pen, but if that MacBook is loaded with a bunch of proprietary or licensed software, I can see why an organization wouldn’t want it being used for financial gain outside of the organization. Perhaps they don’t explicitly “lose” anything, but it’s their investment to have returns on. If a laptop is like a pen, what about a high end graphics workstation? What about a small server? Internet bandwidth is a cheap commodity, can I run my site from work? Electricity is basically free (I charge my personal scooter at work), what about a small Bitcoin miner?
II2II 4y ago
So you're the one who keeps taking the company's pens ... More seriously though, there are frequently restictions of the use of office equipment (or business equipment in general). Businesses will often overlook it if it is not a problem, say if you need a photocopy of a rental contract. They have the discretion to say no if the privilege is being abused, say if you started printing hundreds of pages a month for personal use. The misuse of pens is rarely seen as an issue since they hold little intrinsic value and are routinely replaced. Should they be able to claim the rights to something you produced with their equipment? In most cases, no. I'm not going to say in all cases no since there is always going to be someone who pushes the limits beyond reason. (Say a person develops a piece of software with a company computer to sell on the side. Can that be construed as the business indirectly financing the development of the software by providing hardware and/or software tools?) In general, it is always a good idea to do personal stuff with personal equipment and business stuff with equipment supplied by the business. I'm sure the coworkers who are searching for the missing pens will thank you for doing so.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

j01 4y ago

I think it's fine to require that you cannot use work equipment for personal projects, but claiming ownership of a project written on the weekend on a company laptop isn't the solution.

tjoff 4y ago

So now I have to lug around two of everything (laptop, phone etc) just because I might want to do something unrelated to work? It is completely unreasonable as a blanket statement.

NikolaNovak 4y ago
Three. My employer's laptop, my current client's laptop (I'm in a consulting branch of a large corporation), and my personal laptop. Pre-Covid I lugged them on airplanes every week. I enjoy HN for many reasons, one of which is to encounter approaches and perspectives that I would not ever even remotely consider. I would not use my employer's laptop for personal, let alone a side-gig purpose, with a 10 foot pole. It's not mine, I have no control of it, I have no visibility into what is being monitored nor how it is used, where the data goes, what I should install on it, etc. Employer has full legal right to request it back this evening, do whatever forensic examinations they want, and have interesting questions or claims on anything they find. Yes laptop is a tool, but it's such a complex multipurpose massively powerful dangerous tool, that even if we try to make a claim "Pen and Laptop are legally the same as a employer-provided-tool", I find the surface area of a Pen minuscule compared to the surface area of a laptop and everything I can do with it / put on it.
- wepple 4y ago
  Big +1 on that. I assume a model where my work laptop screen is being directly mirrored into a room with 100 people watching it 24x7, basically. Entirely impossible, but every organization has some level of monitoring between zero and my theoretical scenario, so I carry a personal device and completely sidestep the entire issue.
  - tjoff 4y ago
    And I've setup everything from scratch. There is no software on there that I wouldn't install on my personal machine. If anyone wanted access to it they'd have to ask me for a password noone else knows. Yes, it is perfectly reasonable and in many cases prudent to not use your companies laptop for home-use. So you may chose not to do it. That the company would own everything you did on it is still completely unreasonable.

Turing_Machine 4y ago

Another wrinkle on "company property" you have to watch out for: When I was in grad school, a professor in my department left to take a job at another university. The beancounters demanded the return of the department-issued computer he'd had...in 1985. Of course, that was many, many computers ago, and what almost certainly happened was that he'd transferred the machine to a grad student or whatever when he got a new one, and they'd just lost the record of the transfer (or never entered it in the first place). Still, he had to go through a week or so of back and forth before they were convinced that a) it was unreasonable to expect him to account for a computer from decades ago and b) even if he did still have the 1985 computer, it wouldn't be worth anything like their book value any more. They actually wanted to charge him the original 1985 price for the "missing" computer! I guess the moral there is to keep your own careful log of what happens to any company property that's been issued to you.

buildbot 4y ago
When I worked in tech support at my University, we 100% knew we were never getting it back but had to ask like once a year anyway because government. Public money means excessive tracing for any asset!!