4 ms·

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

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)

deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
josephg 2y ago
Sure; but it’s a lot more ambiguous if you’re a programmer & writing code on the weekend. Especially if the code is in any way related to your work. Also whatever your contract says takes priority over the law in cases like this. Always read your employment contract carefully and clarify stuff like that if you need to. Your company doesn’t want copyright over the fanfic you’re writing on the weekend. If that matters to you, the best time to clarify it is before you sign the contract.
- bluGill 2y ago
  Don't write code related to work on the weekend. That is unethical no matter what the law says. There is plenty of code not related to work that you can write on weekends and thus it is ethical (may or may not legally be yours but ethicaly it is)
  - crazydoggers 2y ago
    There is no way that it is unethical. According to who’s ethics? According to my ethics it’s unethical for a company to believe it has any say whatsoever about what I author unless I give them specific assignment of what I create for specific compensation. Outside of that, they can go float a boat. They hired me for my talent; and will compensate me adequately or I will provide my services elsewhere; and it’s up to me to determine what that looks like when I signed a contract with them. It sounds like the corporate lawyers have succeeded in making you think they’re doing you all the favor when you create the value for them. There’s a reason the FTC ruled against non-competes. It’s “ethically un-American”.
    - bluGill 2y ago
      The work related part makes it unethical. Unless they pay you to work weekends or otherwise compensate you (on my team when you work a weekends we expect you to take time off in the near future to compensate for that time) doing something that competes with the company you work for is not ethical.
      - josephg 2y ago
        Ehhh this is way more complicated than you make it sound. For example, I've been in situations where I've successfully argued for some component of what we do at work to be opensourced. But I wasn't given any extra resources to opensource it. I was doing consulting work at the time and the company didn't have a culture of contributing to opensource. In that case, I spent a couple weekends cleaning up the code I'd opensourced & triaging github issues. I'm proud of my work, and I want to share it. In another company, we were running into some limitations of the database we were using. I spent a weekend writing up a super simple database prototype from scratch, mostly as a research project for myself. I don't think we ever used any of the code I wrote. I probably ended up throwing it on github and then forgot about it. That database prototype was clearly "work related". But it was also very clearly not part of my job. - Although, working on that database made me better at my job. It helped me understand the limitations of the database we were using, and gave me some ideas on how to work around them. How can you argue that it was unethical to do any of that work? Frankly, everyone benefited. I learned a lot. I got better at my job - (and more employable). And my company benefited directly (and immediately) from my work.
      - crazydoggers 2y ago
        Are you perhaps not from the United States? Your take that it’s unethical seems to contradict with nearly 200 years of American IP law, or even further back to the 1400s in English common law where non competes were considered unjustifiable restraints on trade. In the United States IP rights go to the inventor and most must be explicitly transferred to an employer. The whole point of the patent office is to encourage inventors to invent and not allow corporations to own everything and prevent competition. Although some companies have attempted to rig the system to prevent competition, ultimately the law has come down to foster competition (see the recent defeats of patent trolls) And as the other commenter here points out, there are so many cases where someone working at a company discovers a way to improve business in the industry they are employed in, that could compete with their current employer, and that employer is unable or unwilling to devote resources or compensate for it. Huge swaths of US innovation or driven by such things. Probably the most iconic example is Steve Wozniak inventing the Apple I while he was working at HP, which HP refused to acquire and support causing Steve to resign and start Apple. I also write this as someone with a name on a patent I chose to transfer to a company I helped found for an invention I helped create while working there. But to be clear, that was my choice. Ultimately the law said it was my invention by default, and there was no legal, moral, ethical, or god given obligation preventing me from walking away with it.
  - saagarjha 2y ago
    Clearly you have never worked for a large company that lays claim on basically any field.
    - bluGill 2y ago
      As I said what is legal and what is ethical. I believe ethically code not related to your job that you do on weekends is yours. The law may or may not agree.
      - saagarjha 2y ago
        My point is that your company will often claim that any code you write on the weekends is theirs regardless of what it is.
  - purple_turtle 2y ago
    > Don't write code related to work on the weekend. That is unethical no matter what the law says. Why getting paid and working on weekend would be unethical? Why law would relevant at all for ethics here?
    - bluGill 2y ago
      It is about doing unpaid work. Most progarmmers - at least in the us - are not paid by the hour and so you get nothing for you extra time put in which is not ethical for them to ask. It is perfectly leagal for you to do it. laws and ethics are often different but many fail to realize that.
      - purple_turtle 2y ago
        > Most progarmmers Yes, definitely true. > It is about doing unpaid work. If someone does unpaid work on weekends and it is not done as hobby or something they are very silly, exploited or both. > which is not ethical for them to ask definitely, though I am highly confused why someone would agree to this (unless they are basically enslaved or something which would make it even blatantly unethical) I guess that if you agree to sky-high wages with implicit agreement to work absurdly long hours, despite written contract being different? > laws and ethics are often different but many fail to realize that. not sure about "many", people in general I quite happy to break laws, especially ones widely agreed to be silly and not enforced at all
  - noumuon 2y ago
    You are not the arbiter of the ethics of people's choices.
- crazydoggers 2y ago
  First, definitely consult a lawyer and your contract. In the US contract law pretty much says if you signed it, you agreed to it, then it holds, unless the law overrides it. For example, you could sign a contract that says you are now an indentured servant, but that violates the law, so would be unenforceable (at least in the US since 1917). However if it says the equivalent of “any code you write on your personal time is our property” you basically agreed to that being the case and you’d have to consult a lawyer in your state before making a determination if that contract would hold up in court. The best assumption prior to that would be to assume it is valid. In addition, the FTC recently banned non competes country wide, which went into effect in September 2024. There have been a number of challenges to the ruling that have yet to work through the legal system, so it’s best to consult your states laws for the time being. But outside of that, if a company in the US is telling you that your software that you can prove you developed on your personal time on your personal property is somehow theirs, and you are certain you never signed such a non-compete or an assignment agreement that covers work on your personal time; then find a new company to work at. They are basically bullying you. If your employee contract is so ambiguous regarding copyright assignment of software written on your own personal time and assets as to not be certain, find a new company as well, as they are probably incompetent. (You’d probably be safe however, as Contra proferentem in the US is a rule that states an ambiguous contract term should be construed against the drafter of the contract) In fact, in the US, the author always owns the copyright. So in fact the company has to put in place an agreement that outlines that your code copyright is transferred to them. If you pay someone to write software, without such an agreement, the author will still actually hold the copyright. The company can use “work for hire” but since that means they have to prove that they hired you specifically for what your wrote, that it was written in the “scope of employment”; most employers who know what they are doing will have you sign an assignment agreement. Without an assignment agreement; if you write something they didn’t hire you to write and you didn’t agree to assign the copyright to them, you own it. In fact, if a company also wants to patent something that you’ve invented or been part of inventing, they need to get you to file a patent assignment with the USPTO. This may or may not be outlined in your employment contract, but the assignment still needs to be made. You could refuse, most likely at the cost of your employment, however the patent rights would still remain with you the inventor. Not even work for hire would transfer patent or trademark rights. All that said, it should be obvious, however it’s probably best pointed out.. if you copy any code that is owned by the company (code written by another employee or that you transferred ownership of to the employer) then you’re committing copyright infringement and can be held liable. So you better be sure your code is 100% yours.
- j-bos 2y ago
  The contract explicitly includes IP unrelated to the company's business.
  - josephg 2y ago
    Yes, I've seen that too. Then I said "well, you're hiring me in part because of my opensource work. It looks like this contract wouldn't allow me to continue doing any opensource work once I start working here. That would be a huge problem for me." I think the managers involved hadn't read the employment contract itself - or didn't understand the implications of a clause like that for opensource devs. They didn't want to stop me writing opensource code when I felt like it. So we figured it out. Contracts aren't written in blood. They're just an agreement between two parties. You don't have to agree to whatever crappy, one sided terms are waved in front of your face. And remember, its common for companies to spend 40+ hours of work in sourcing, interviewing candidates, hiring panel discussions and so on before they finally give you an offer. Especially in the era of AI generated resume spam. It would be extremely silly to throw all that work away over a grabby IP assignment clause added on a whim by one of their lawyers. Now, yes - some companies are absolutely that silly. But most people have a lot more negotiating power than they think. Especially when it comes to ridiculous clauses like this. At a minimum, its always worth raising.
    - crazydoggers 2y ago
      This is an extremely important point. A lot of managers don’t read the employment contracts. Often times the legal departments (or just lawyer depending on company size) has just drafted something that protects the company as much as is legally possible. That’s often the safest thing for the attorney to do. It’s never a bad thing to redline a contract and have discussions over sections that you’re uncomfortable with. A good company will work on them with you.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
ternnoburn 2y ago
[flagged]
- jarsin 2y ago
  I have published novels and awhile ago an Amazon recruiter reached out to me for a tech role on a team building story tracking software. It never went anywhere but I did wonder at the time how they view employees writing their own novels or movies etc. For example, would they have any possible claims on any future novels based in those existing worlds and characters in my previous works. Obviously they have the funds to outlast you in any claim if by small chance you happen to have a hit at some point.
KPGv2 2y ago
> this will almost certainly be outlined in your employee contract A majority of employees in the US are at-will, meaning there is no employment contract whatsoever.

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

josephg 2y ago

Sure; but it’s a lot more ambiguous if you’re a programmer & writing code on the weekend. Especially if the code is in any way related to your work. Also whatever your contract says takes priority over the law in cases like this. Always read your employment contract carefully and clarify stuff like that if you need to. Your company doesn’t want copyright over the fanfic you’re writing on the weekend. If that matters to you, the best time to clarify it is before you sign the contract.

bluGill 2y ago
Don't write code related to work on the weekend. That is unethical no matter what the law says. There is plenty of code not related to work that you can write on weekends and thus it is ethical (may or may not legally be yours but ethicaly it is)
- crazydoggers 2y ago
  There is no way that it is unethical. According to who’s ethics? According to my ethics it’s unethical for a company to believe it has any say whatsoever about what I author unless I give them specific assignment of what I create for specific compensation. Outside of that, they can go float a boat. They hired me for my talent; and will compensate me adequately or I will provide my services elsewhere; and it’s up to me to determine what that looks like when I signed a contract with them. It sounds like the corporate lawyers have succeeded in making you think they’re doing you all the favor when you create the value for them. There’s a reason the FTC ruled against non-competes. It’s “ethically un-American”.
  - bluGill 2y ago
    The work related part makes it unethical. Unless they pay you to work weekends or otherwise compensate you (on my team when you work a weekends we expect you to take time off in the near future to compensate for that time) doing something that competes with the company you work for is not ethical.
    - josephg 2y ago
      Ehhh this is way more complicated than you make it sound. For example, I've been in situations where I've successfully argued for some component of what we do at work to be opensourced. But I wasn't given any extra resources to opensource it. I was doing consulting work at the time and the company didn't have a culture of contributing to opensource. In that case, I spent a couple weekends cleaning up the code I'd opensourced & triaging github issues. I'm proud of my work, and I want to share it. In another company, we were running into some limitations of the database we were using. I spent a weekend writing up a super simple database prototype from scratch, mostly as a research project for myself. I don't think we ever used any of the code I wrote. I probably ended up throwing it on github and then forgot about it. That database prototype was clearly "work related". But it was also very clearly not part of my job. - Although, working on that database made me better at my job. It helped me understand the limitations of the database we were using, and gave me some ideas on how to work around them. How can you argue that it was unethical to do any of that work? Frankly, everyone benefited. I learned a lot. I got better at my job - (and more employable). And my company benefited directly (and immediately) from my work.
    - crazydoggers 2y ago
      Are you perhaps not from the United States? Your take that it’s unethical seems to contradict with nearly 200 years of American IP law, or even further back to the 1400s in English common law where non competes were considered unjustifiable restraints on trade. In the United States IP rights go to the inventor and most must be explicitly transferred to an employer. The whole point of the patent office is to encourage inventors to invent and not allow corporations to own everything and prevent competition. Although some companies have attempted to rig the system to prevent competition, ultimately the law has come down to foster competition (see the recent defeats of patent trolls) And as the other commenter here points out, there are so many cases where someone working at a company discovers a way to improve business in the industry they are employed in, that could compete with their current employer, and that employer is unable or unwilling to devote resources or compensate for it. Huge swaths of US innovation or driven by such things. Probably the most iconic example is Steve Wozniak inventing the Apple I while he was working at HP, which HP refused to acquire and support causing Steve to resign and start Apple. I also write this as someone with a name on a patent I chose to transfer to a company I helped found for an invention I helped create while working there. But to be clear, that was my choice. Ultimately the law said it was my invention by default, and there was no legal, moral, ethical, or god given obligation preventing me from walking away with it.
- saagarjha 2y ago
  Clearly you have never worked for a large company that lays claim on basically any field.
  - bluGill 2y ago
    As I said what is legal and what is ethical. I believe ethically code not related to your job that you do on weekends is yours. The law may or may not agree.
    - saagarjha 2y ago
      My point is that your company will often claim that any code you write on the weekends is theirs regardless of what it is.
- purple_turtle 2y ago
  > Don't write code related to work on the weekend. That is unethical no matter what the law says. Why getting paid and working on weekend would be unethical? Why law would relevant at all for ethics here?
  - bluGill 2y ago
    It is about doing unpaid work. Most progarmmers - at least in the us - are not paid by the hour and so you get nothing for you extra time put in which is not ethical for them to ask. It is perfectly leagal for you to do it. laws and ethics are often different but many fail to realize that.
    - purple_turtle 2y ago
      > Most progarmmers Yes, definitely true. > It is about doing unpaid work. If someone does unpaid work on weekends and it is not done as hobby or something they are very silly, exploited or both. > which is not ethical for them to ask definitely, though I am highly confused why someone would agree to this (unless they are basically enslaved or something which would make it even blatantly unethical) I guess that if you agree to sky-high wages with implicit agreement to work absurdly long hours, despite written contract being different? > laws and ethics are often different but many fail to realize that. not sure about "many", people in general I quite happy to break laws, especially ones widely agreed to be silly and not enforced at all
- noumuon 2y ago
  You are not the arbiter of the ethics of people's choices.
crazydoggers 2y ago
First, definitely consult a lawyer and your contract. In the US contract law pretty much says if you signed it, you agreed to it, then it holds, unless the law overrides it. For example, you could sign a contract that says you are now an indentured servant, but that violates the law, so would be unenforceable (at least in the US since 1917). However if it says the equivalent of “any code you write on your personal time is our property” you basically agreed to that being the case and you’d have to consult a lawyer in your state before making a determination if that contract would hold up in court. The best assumption prior to that would be to assume it is valid. In addition, the FTC recently banned non competes country wide, which went into effect in September 2024. There have been a number of challenges to the ruling that have yet to work through the legal system, so it’s best to consult your states laws for the time being. But outside of that, if a company in the US is telling you that your software that you can prove you developed on your personal time on your personal property is somehow theirs, and you are certain you never signed such a non-compete or an assignment agreement that covers work on your personal time; then find a new company to work at. They are basically bullying you. If your employee contract is so ambiguous regarding copyright assignment of software written on your own personal time and assets as to not be certain, find a new company as well, as they are probably incompetent. (You’d probably be safe however, as Contra proferentem in the US is a rule that states an ambiguous contract term should be construed against the drafter of the contract) In fact, in the US, the author always owns the copyright. So in fact the company has to put in place an agreement that outlines that your code copyright is transferred to them. If you pay someone to write software, without such an agreement, the author will still actually hold the copyright. The company can use “work for hire” but since that means they have to prove that they hired you specifically for what your wrote, that it was written in the “scope of employment”; most employers who know what they are doing will have you sign an assignment agreement. Without an assignment agreement; if you write something they didn’t hire you to write and you didn’t agree to assign the copyright to them, you own it. In fact, if a company also wants to patent something that you’ve invented or been part of inventing, they need to get you to file a patent assignment with the USPTO. This may or may not be outlined in your employment contract, but the assignment still needs to be made. You could refuse, most likely at the cost of your employment, however the patent rights would still remain with you the inventor. Not even work for hire would transfer patent or trademark rights. All that said, it should be obvious, however it’s probably best pointed out.. if you copy any code that is owned by the company (code written by another employee or that you transferred ownership of to the employer) then you’re committing copyright infringement and can be held liable. So you better be sure your code is 100% yours.
j-bos 2y ago
The contract explicitly includes IP unrelated to the company's business.
- josephg 2y ago
  Yes, I've seen that too. Then I said "well, you're hiring me in part because of my opensource work. It looks like this contract wouldn't allow me to continue doing any opensource work once I start working here. That would be a huge problem for me." I think the managers involved hadn't read the employment contract itself - or didn't understand the implications of a clause like that for opensource devs. They didn't want to stop me writing opensource code when I felt like it. So we figured it out. Contracts aren't written in blood. They're just an agreement between two parties. You don't have to agree to whatever crappy, one sided terms are waved in front of your face. And remember, its common for companies to spend 40+ hours of work in sourcing, interviewing candidates, hiring panel discussions and so on before they finally give you an offer. Especially in the era of AI generated resume spam. It would be extremely silly to throw all that work away over a grabby IP assignment clause added on a whim by one of their lawyers. Now, yes - some companies are absolutely that silly. But most people have a lot more negotiating power than they think. Especially when it comes to ridiculous clauses like this. At a minimum, its always worth raising.
  - crazydoggers 2y ago
    This is an extremely important point. A lot of managers don’t read the employment contracts. Often times the legal departments (or just lawyer depending on company size) has just drafted something that protects the company as much as is legally possible. That’s often the safest thing for the attorney to do. It’s never a bad thing to redline a contract and have discussions over sections that you’re uncomfortable with. A good company will work on them with you.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

ternnoburn 2y ago

[flagged]

jarsin 2y ago
I have published novels and awhile ago an Amazon recruiter reached out to me for a tech role on a team building story tracking software. It never went anywhere but I did wonder at the time how they view employees writing their own novels or movies etc. For example, would they have any possible claims on any future novels based in those existing worlds and characters in my previous works. Obviously they have the funds to outlast you in any claim if by small chance you happen to have a hit at some point.

KPGv2 2y ago

> this will almost certainly be outlined in your employee contract A majority of employees in the US are at-will, meaning there is no employment contract whatsoever.