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Comment by adetrest | Hacker News Reader

Meanwhile, in the US and Canada, you are forced to sign clauses that gives your employer full ownership of anything you invent ever while employed and you have to ask your ~parents~ employer if you could please do something else on the side. Good for Sweden, these feodal rules are dragging everyone down.

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When I first learned about this type of contract I couldn’t even believe the concept. How can anybody think it’s ok that a company can claim and kind of ownership over things an employee does in his free time? I have signed up for 40 hours a week and not for being fully owned by the company.

What happens if you work another job and invent things there? Do the companies own each other’s stuff?

So would you assume you can work 40 hr and trade secrets from your employer as a side hustle, just because it's not happening within the work time?

Are those contract clauses limited to trade secrets?

They often are not limited. In essence the company claims it owns all your creative output while you are employed.

You're presumably already bound to confidentiality.

This is not about trade secrets.

You can do work on the side without disclosing your employers trade secrets, I would hope. There is nothing mysterious about yet another CRUD web application. Besides, confidentiality is covered separately and an NDA can stand on its own.

I suspect employers love restricting your right to have a side hustle so that they absolutely totally own you. If you have no other means of income besides your job they can lean on you pretty hard and there isn't much you can do about it if you like having a roof over your head.

If someone wants to trade their employer's secrets, there are MUCH easier ways to do so than creating their own side business. This looks like a straw-man argument.

There is often a clause which warrants that you have no conflicting obligations, though if you make a habit of signing these there likely is a conflict. The real solution is to severely limit these terms to reasonable scope. Some are written to be absurdly over-broad.

I like to frame it in terms of reputation risk to the company. If they own the contents of people's creative hobbies outside of work then I am happy to put "Copyright $COMPANY" in big letters on my amateur porn website... Surprisingly few companies have thought about it that way.

> and you have to ask your ~~parents~~ employer if you could please do something else on the side

What does this mean?

It's meant to be struck out but HN doesn't do strikeout text. I meant that just as when you were in school and needed a hall pass or note from your parents to be absent, once you're an adult you need a formal authorization from your employer to work on anything else than your job during your employment even if it's on your own time.

Surely this is down to the individual employer? Some companies try to add clauses like this to contracts here in the UK but thankfully they're generally not enforceable.

Speaking as an employer, what my employees get up to in their own time is their business as long as they get their work done when they're supposed to.

> Surely this is down to the individual employer?

In theory, yes, In practice, nearly every single US employer has this somewhere in their contract automatically by default -- the only way a company doesn't, is if someone explicitly got it removed.

Also, in much of the US, the clause is enforceable, so companies have basically no incentive to remove it.

Count your blessings, every US and Canadian work contract (hell, even some contracting/consulting agreements) I have ever seen or signed had a no-compete and a clause prohibiting you from doing anything else than working for your employer.

Not all companies do this- mine owns anything that is made during work time or using work resources.

However I did sign a forced arbitration clause which is equally BS.

Actually in Sweden you have this also. Most people just have it removed from the contract. In the US it is the same. or you get a version that instead just says they own anything done during company time or using employer resources.

Not in California, which at least partially explains why SV is not somewhere else.

>you are forced to sign clauses that gives your employer full ownership of anything you invent ever while employed

You know, you don't have to sign those.

I always cross out those and tell them to send it back when its fixed. Only my first job I was afraid to do this.

My (Swedish) company tried this. I got it crossed out after I pointed out that that meant they also had legal responsibility for anything I produce out of work hours.

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