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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: 2) by Kromagv0 on Tuesday September 13 2016, @06:15PM
The reason for such clauses is that your company (like most software companies) is probably writing software to sell to someone, either directly or as part of a product. As such, they need to own the code. Consider the chaos if an employee could claim "yeah, I wrote that code at 5:30, but I clocked out at 5, so it's mine." Or if you wrote an algorithm to solve a problem on your blog, and later used it at work, then claimed copyright.
Could they solve the problem with a less heavy handed approach? Possibly. But lawyers are conservative and prefer broad covers to narrow ones.
The first statement is spot on in my experience, but I hear rumors of others not being so lucky. The second one I would say yes to and I work at a company that seems to have figured out a better solution. My employer has had problems with employees moonlighting at a competitor doing their exact same job but as contractors. So we ended up with a policy that basically states that if you want to create IP on your own time you need to get approval from your manager and their manager to do so. If you get approval you own what you create if not then the company could claim they own it. I have sought approval for a few things and never had them denied as they weren't related to what I do for my job. Interestingly enough because of one of the side things my manager found out that I knew a fair amount about GIS and cartography and when one of our customers wanted to add some related functionality I basically got to dive in and design that solution for them. I ended up getting a pretty nice raise out of the project as well.
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