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> When you take a job, in most places in the world, by default, your employer owns and/or effectively controls all your copyrights. Is this really true? I have

> When you take a job, in most places in the world, by default, your employer owns and/or effectively controls all your copyrights. Is this really true? I haven't checked my employment agreement, but I'm pretty sure that my employer only controls the copyrights for a) work I do for them, and b) any other side work I happen to do in my employer's field (which never happens). AFAIK, work I do on my own that is unrelated to my employer belongs to me, and I've never had anyone from my job try to assert otherwise. (I have plenty of publicly-visible code on GitHub that they could glom onto if they wanted, although none of it is commercially important.) --- Edit: My employee agreement says "I understand that the provisions this Agreement requiring assignment of Company Work Product do not apply to any Non-Company Work Product that qualifies fully under the provisions of Section 2870 of the California Labor Code, or any similar state invention law." That labor code says "Any provision in an employment agreement which provides that an employee shall assign, or offer to assign, any of his or her rights in an invention to his or her employer shall not apply to an invention that the employee developed entirely on his or her own time without using the employer’s equipment, supplies, facilities, or trade secret information except for those inventions that either: (1) Relate at the time of conception or reduction to practice of the invention to the employer’s business, or actual or demonstrably anticipated research or development of the employer; or (2) Result from any work performed by the employee for the employer."

bluehatbrit 2y ago
You should probably check it, in the UK this is pretty standard, and I believe it is in the US as well. I suspect most of Europe is similar as well. It will vary by company and industry, but in my experience when you ask HR and Legal to put together a contract for a knowledge-worker, this is a standard edition by them. I've never had a job actually assert anything around this personally, but I do make sure to have anything notable signed off by my employer as "mine". That's assuming it's unrelated to my employers field of course.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- josephg 2y ago
  Yeah I always check this too - and if needed add a clause to my contract to make it clear that programming work I do outside of business hours & using my own equipment remains mine. I do a lot of opensource work and it would be a disaster to have copyright ownership clouds hanging overhead. But for a company to assert a copyright like this, they would have to actually sue. And companies will always be loathe to sue employees over incidental stuff like this because the negative press will almost always make it not worth it.
  - bruce511 2y ago
    The point raised by the article is the reverse. They agree with you that your company does not want to sue. Specifically (in some cases) they explicitly remove your ability to sue violators. Obviously each company and employee situation is different, but the default position is they own the copyright, and they'd prefer not to sue anyone. This leads to copyright violations being ignored. Whether violations are something you care about or not is up to you. Personally I don't get over wound up by it (my code is pirated all the time) but others feel very strongly in this space. This article is pointing out that if you do care, then it pays to make sure where your copyright exists.
- purple_turtle 2y ago
  > this is a standard edition by them note that in many/some cases they are happy to drop such clause if you demand it at least I negotiated it away multiple times (though it was not some large corporation, they were more cargo-culting contract text)
j-bos 2y ago
I work at a fortune 500 and you have to go through hoops to own anything. By letter of the contract they own all the IP we produce which legally includes photos taken. Doubtful they'd enforce that, but it gives them a strong position if one were to write any useful code outside of work.
- munchler 2y ago
  I work for a Fortune 500 as well, FWIW.
  - j-bos 2y ago
    And your employment agreement contract includes the same broad assignment clause?
    - noumuon 2y ago
      I work for a Fortune 100 company. Dystopian hell hole of out of touch executives in an amorphous blob of a company that only continues due to its massive size and momentum, gobbling up companies because they can't compete and eventually sucking the soul from them... but they only own the rights to things produced on their time or on their equipment.
- jarsin 2y ago
  Are you saying if you worked as a programmer in your standard fortune 500 company and wrote fiction on the weekends they own the copyright to the fiction? Would be interesting to see how it would play out if a programmers fiction blew up as big as Harry Potter or something.
  - crazydoggers 2y ago
    If you utilize any of the company’s assets or property in its creation then they can argue ownership. For example if you write it on their laptop that you take home on the weekend, or you spend your lunch break at the computer in your office writing it, etc. (this will almost certainly be outlined in your employee contract) If you write it at home on your personal property during your personal time, then they have as much claim to it as the work you do on your house or the models you paint or the soap you make and sell to your friends… which is none. However, if it’s work you’re doing in the same industry, then you have to deal with non-compete clauses in your employment agreement depending on what state you live in. Edit: This is USA law as I understand it (IANAL)
kps 2y ago
Likewise, I have commercially irrelevant code on GitHub/Codeberg. But as it is all under BSD or MIT licenses, it makes no practical difference to me if my current employer wants to claim ownership; I can pick up where I left off all the same.
- munchler 2y ago
  IANAL, but I think that if they were to assert copyright over your code, the license you chose would be irrelevant (since the code was never yours to license in the first place).
  - josephg 2y ago
    Maybe. If you’re a senior engineer, I could also imagine arguing that I had authority to license it under BSD or whatever as an agent of my employer. The argument would probably be much stronger if you got sign off from your boss though. And legal if your company is big enough. (Though IANAL)
  - kps 2y ago
    I should have clarified (and it's too late to edit) that this refers to code I wrote and licensed before the applicable employment. It was already made public under a BSD/MIT license, so everyone (including me) is allowed to use and fork that version, even the ownership later changes and the new owner licenses theirs differently.
Joel_Mckay 2y ago
The employment lawyer I consulted a few years back stated all work done outside office hours is essentially implicit property of your employer in Canada/UK... unless explicitly stated in your employment contract that external unrelated projects are your own. In most of the US, all work done outside of your employers business is implicitly your own... unless explicitly stated in your employment contract that they have rights to such works. In general, most commercial businesses won't care unless their IP or resources were misappropriated for a personal project. Best of luck =3
- nmstoker 2y ago
  My UK contract had no IP terms and after many years they tried to sneak them in via the employee handbook - I objected and we negotiated, ending up with a reasonable and amicable split: anything directly related to their line of business is theirs (whether in the office or not) but everything else is mine personally. This seems the ideal balance as we each get what's valuable to us without overreaching (the original proposed terms would've covered literally everything including random stuff like books and video posts, which they didn't genuinely care about)
  - josephg 2y ago
    Yeah. I think a lot of people who write these contracts (or work in HR) simply never consider the idea that people would create things outside of business hours. They don’t want to steal your fanfic or that song you’re writing or whatever. Just talk to them and make the contract look right.
    - j-bos 2y ago
      It's a slog because at big companies anyone below a "department head" is not getting custom addendums added to their contract.
      - josephg 2y ago
        Depends on the company. I've had companies do this for me. In one large company I won't name, the way we did it was to have someone with enough authority give me a statement in writing acknowledging that anything I made outside of business hours, using my own computing equipment wasn't owned by the company. That was good enough for me.
einpoklum 2y ago
> Is this really true? From my personal experience, this really depends. Some employment agreements are stated very widely, so the employer even gets retroactive ownership of things you do in the past; some include copyrights for work you'll do in the future, after employment, in the same domain which can be said to be based on work you've done for the employer; some include all side-work regardless of domain, while you work there; some don't.
aulin 2y ago
What is your own time when you work remotely with flexible hours?
- purple_turtle 2y ago
  The time I am not getting paid for. If employer want to control my time they are obligated to pay me for it. If they want to control all of it, I expect to be paid hourly rate 24h/day.
  - aulin 2y ago
    Good luck enforcing that if there's a controversy. You never check personal email on company devices? Participate in mailing lists? Bug trackers for personal projects? Business hours is an obsolete concept in modern world, unless you work in an office with precise time tracking. A signed agreement from your employer is the only thing that holds and that's why FSF asks for it.
    - purple_turtle 2y ago
      > You never check personal email on company devices? Participate in mailing lists? Bug trackers for personal projects? no there is no chance whatsoever that something as critical as my email signin is on any device not fully controlled by myself the same goes for malware/Microsoft OS requested by employer, if they have need for it they need to provide hardware for running it > Business hours is an obsolete concept in modern world, unless you work in an office with precise time tracking. I charge per hour, I do a precise time tracking.
    - bigstrat2003 2y ago
      > You never check personal email on company devices? Participate in mailing lists? Bug trackers for personal projects? No, of course I don't. Work time is work time, and personal time is personal time. > Business hours is an obsolete concept in modern world, unless you work in an office with precise time tracking. It's not obsolete at all. Some people are foolish enough to blend working time and personal time, which is their affair. But lots of us understand the wisdom of keeping business hours separate.

bluehatbrit 2y ago

You should probably check it, in the UK this is pretty standard, and I believe it is in the US as well. I suspect most of Europe is similar as well. It will vary by company and industry, but in my experience when you ask HR and Legal to put together a contract for a knowledge-worker, this is a standard edition by them. I've never had a job actually assert anything around this personally, but I do make sure to have anything notable signed off by my employer as "mine". That's assuming it's unrelated to my employers field of course.

deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
josephg 2y ago
Yeah I always check this too - and if needed add a clause to my contract to make it clear that programming work I do outside of business hours & using my own equipment remains mine. I do a lot of opensource work and it would be a disaster to have copyright ownership clouds hanging overhead. But for a company to assert a copyright like this, they would have to actually sue. And companies will always be loathe to sue employees over incidental stuff like this because the negative press will almost always make it not worth it.
- bruce511 2y ago
  The point raised by the article is the reverse. They agree with you that your company does not want to sue. Specifically (in some cases) they explicitly remove your ability to sue violators. Obviously each company and employee situation is different, but the default position is they own the copyright, and they'd prefer not to sue anyone. This leads to copyright violations being ignored. Whether violations are something you care about or not is up to you. Personally I don't get over wound up by it (my code is pirated all the time) but others feel very strongly in this space. This article is pointing out that if you do care, then it pays to make sure where your copyright exists.
purple_turtle 2y ago
> this is a standard edition by them note that in many/some cases they are happy to drop such clause if you demand it at least I negotiated it away multiple times (though it was not some large corporation, they were more cargo-culting contract text)

j-bos 2y ago

I work at a fortune 500 and you have to go through hoops to own anything. By letter of the contract they own all the IP we produce which legally includes photos taken. Doubtful they'd enforce that, but it gives them a strong position if one were to write any useful code outside of work.

munchler 2y ago
I work for a Fortune 500 as well, FWIW.
- j-bos 2y ago
  And your employment agreement contract includes the same broad assignment clause?
  - noumuon 2y ago
    I work for a Fortune 100 company. Dystopian hell hole of out of touch executives in an amorphous blob of a company that only continues due to its massive size and momentum, gobbling up companies because they can't compete and eventually sucking the soul from them... but they only own the rights to things produced on their time or on their equipment.
jarsin 2y ago
Are you saying if you worked as a programmer in your standard fortune 500 company and wrote fiction on the weekends they own the copyright to the fiction? Would be interesting to see how it would play out if a programmers fiction blew up as big as Harry Potter or something.
- crazydoggers 2y ago
  If you utilize any of the company’s assets or property in its creation then they can argue ownership. For example if you write it on their laptop that you take home on the weekend, or you spend your lunch break at the computer in your office writing it, etc. (this will almost certainly be outlined in your employee contract) If you write it at home on your personal property during your personal time, then they have as much claim to it as the work you do on your house or the models you paint or the soap you make and sell to your friends… which is none. However, if it’s work you’re doing in the same industry, then you have to deal with non-compete clauses in your employment agreement depending on what state you live in. Edit: This is USA law as I understand it (IANAL)

kps 2y ago

Likewise, I have commercially irrelevant code on GitHub/Codeberg. But as it is all under BSD or MIT licenses, it makes no practical difference to me if my current employer wants to claim ownership; I can pick up where I left off all the same.

munchler 2y ago
IANAL, but I think that if they were to assert copyright over your code, the license you chose would be irrelevant (since the code was never yours to license in the first place).
- josephg 2y ago
  Maybe. If you’re a senior engineer, I could also imagine arguing that I had authority to license it under BSD or whatever as an agent of my employer. The argument would probably be much stronger if you got sign off from your boss though. And legal if your company is big enough. (Though IANAL)
- kps 2y ago
  I should have clarified (and it's too late to edit) that this refers to code I wrote and licensed before the applicable employment. It was already made public under a BSD/MIT license, so everyone (including me) is allowed to use and fork that version, even the ownership later changes and the new owner licenses theirs differently.

Joel_Mckay 2y ago

The employment lawyer I consulted a few years back stated all work done outside office hours is essentially implicit property of your employer in Canada/UK... unless explicitly stated in your employment contract that external unrelated projects are your own. In most of the US, all work done outside of your employers business is implicitly your own... unless explicitly stated in your employment contract that they have rights to such works. In general, most commercial businesses won't care unless their IP or resources were misappropriated for a personal project. Best of luck =3

nmstoker 2y ago
My UK contract had no IP terms and after many years they tried to sneak them in via the employee handbook - I objected and we negotiated, ending up with a reasonable and amicable split: anything directly related to their line of business is theirs (whether in the office or not) but everything else is mine personally. This seems the ideal balance as we each get what's valuable to us without overreaching (the original proposed terms would've covered literally everything including random stuff like books and video posts, which they didn't genuinely care about)
- josephg 2y ago
  Yeah. I think a lot of people who write these contracts (or work in HR) simply never consider the idea that people would create things outside of business hours. They don’t want to steal your fanfic or that song you’re writing or whatever. Just talk to them and make the contract look right.
  - j-bos 2y ago
    It's a slog because at big companies anyone below a "department head" is not getting custom addendums added to their contract.
    - josephg 2y ago
      Depends on the company. I've had companies do this for me. In one large company I won't name, the way we did it was to have someone with enough authority give me a statement in writing acknowledging that anything I made outside of business hours, using my own computing equipment wasn't owned by the company. That was good enough for me.

einpoklum 2y ago

> Is this really true? From my personal experience, this really depends. Some employment agreements are stated very widely, so the employer even gets retroactive ownership of things you do in the past; some include copyrights for work you'll do in the future, after employment, in the same domain which can be said to be based on work you've done for the employer; some include all side-work regardless of domain, while you work there; some don't.

aulin 2y ago

What is your own time when you work remotely with flexible hours?

purple_turtle 2y ago
The time I am not getting paid for. If employer want to control my time they are obligated to pay me for it. If they want to control all of it, I expect to be paid hourly rate 24h/day.
- aulin 2y ago
  Good luck enforcing that if there's a controversy. You never check personal email on company devices? Participate in mailing lists? Bug trackers for personal projects? Business hours is an obsolete concept in modern world, unless you work in an office with precise time tracking. A signed agreement from your employer is the only thing that holds and that's why FSF asks for it.
  - purple_turtle 2y ago
    > You never check personal email on company devices? Participate in mailing lists? Bug trackers for personal projects? no there is no chance whatsoever that something as critical as my email signin is on any device not fully controlled by myself the same goes for malware/Microsoft OS requested by employer, if they have need for it they need to provide hardware for running it > Business hours is an obsolete concept in modern world, unless you work in an office with precise time tracking. I charge per hour, I do a precise time tracking.
  - bigstrat2003 2y ago
    > You never check personal email on company devices? Participate in mailing lists? Bug trackers for personal projects? No, of course I don't. Work time is work time, and personal time is personal time. > Business hours is an obsolete concept in modern world, unless you work in an office with precise time tracking. It's not obsolete at all. Some people are foolish enough to blend working time and personal time, which is their affair. But lots of us understand the wisdom of keeping business hours separate.