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from the better-don-your-asbestos-undergarments dept.
An anonymous poster 'The ABKCO Thieves' writes in about new hire paperwork.
I recently started work at a well-known e-commerce business, which is a great opportunity for me. Only after I started did I find out the full inventions, NDA (Non-Disclosure Agreement), non-poaching, and work-for-hire agreement is onerous. It treats any work of authorship during my employment as their property, even if done on my own time and equipment. I can't post the agreement because it would identify the company, and potentially me as well.
Earlier this year I began contributing code to a GPL v2 project that has existed for more than a decade. I want to continue to do so, but how can I without risking "contamination" of it thanks to this agreement? Part of my goal in contributing is to have real live code I can point to, so going under the radar defeats that purpose.
Are these sorts of intellectual property agreements common?
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Thexalon on Tuesday September 13 2016, @01:29PM
One thing to remember is that the companies that like to make these kinds of agreements often don't have a concept of "employee's own time". As in, they believe that if you are on salary, they own your labor 24x7x365, and will act accordingly. One such employer that I've since left decided to give me grief because I wasn't answering my work email promptly at 1:30 AM on a Saturday night.
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
(Score: 2) by Kromagv0 on Tuesday September 13 2016, @06:02PM
One such employer that I've since left decided to give me grief because I wasn't answering my work email promptly at 1:30 AM on a Saturday night.
If my employer did that I would likely respond but it wouldn't be a pleasant response and I might be pretty lit by that point depending on what the rest of my Saturday was fill with. Unless I am specifically on call people know to not contact me outside of work unless it is a real emergency, i.e. someone has died or security breach, and on call actually requires paying me to be on call and extra pay once I answer the phone. I however am willing to be on call most of the time and usually will be a couple of times a month. I had a manager who held the belief that you were to be available 24x7x365 and that was the least annoying aspects of him. The one manager in question insisted that he needed a way to contact me while I would be out hunting for 2 weeks in the arrowhead region of MN away from power and cell towers on my vacation. I finally told him that if he really needed to contact me that he should hire a trained tracker and a team of dogs and start where I would be leaving my car as a courtesy I did show him where I would be leaving my car on a map.
T-Shirts and bumper stickers [zazzle.com] to offend someone