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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 Wednesday September 14 2016, @06:05AM
And when I say new here, I mean, on this planet..
Are these sorts of intellectual property agreements common?
Too damn common, and have been for decades.
The first one I saw was back in the 80's, my sister started working for a rather large TLA company and showed me her contract, it laid claim to all her output both technical and artistic for the duration of her employment. It was the artistic part which worried her, she painted quite a bit back then, sold quite a few and did commission work, the contact was worded in such a manner that it more or less implied they owned her 'body and soul' for the duration. so much so, I'm surprised they didn't get her to sign the thing in blood.
My last full-time IT job had a more 'liberal' IP agreement inasmuch as I was employed to code, it was restricted to them claiming ownership of all and any code I produced whilst contracted, oh, and was forbidden to do work in any form on any other computer systems other than the company's.. apart from that, any other works were my own.
FWIW, my current contract (in a non-IT role and industry) is quite interesting, I design things for my employer, they manufacture and sell these items, yet they make no legal claim, explicit or otherwise, in my contract to any of my work as theirs. As I like to think I'm not a shithead, I treat the designs I do for them as 'work for hire', and as they've been pretty decent to work for I've gotten them out of a hole on a couple of occasions by giving them gratis designs and code I'd done for a couple of my own 'pet projects'.