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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: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday September 13 2016, @04:42PM
This has teeth, of a sort. IBM does just this; they had right of first refusal for anything when I was there, and I watched them enforce this (termination + lawyer-ese ensued) twice. Can't comment on whether IBM actually had the right to do this, blah blah, just that they did do it. Right or wrong didn't matter to them- Fuck the Man, right?... well, the Man will fuck back a lot of the time and you'd better be prepared for a real fight, whether it happens or not. Don't jump my ass about what I'm saying here, I'm just relating what I watched unfold, and I did leave that shithole (global services) a few months later, in part because of this kind of thing.
The people I knew to whom this happened eventually turned out fine, but they endured about 6 months of bullshit (outrage, emotional ups and downs, uncertainty about new jobs, etc.) before things straightened out. If the company is big 'n rich, with lots of legal staff, right or wrong usually doesn't play into it, they can and will fuck with you if they have stated ownership of intellectual property up front. **You may win if you choose to run the gauntlet, but it is a big, nasty gauntlet that you will run if the company chooses.