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Don't you think that this system is at least a little bit unfair? Why does Google automatically get claim on work that has no relation to Google, done without compensation from Google, and without any of Google's equipment or facilities? How come these people need Google permission to assert a claim on their own intellectual property that is entirely distinct from anything involving Google? It sounds like this was established simply so that Google can claim things that they have no real right to claim and misappropriate an employee's work as convenient.

How come you can't just say "All work on Google-owned software is copyright Google. All work directly assigned by Google management is copyright Google. All work performed wholly independently and separate from Google by Google employees is copyright its respective owners."? I don't get it.

You're arguing with the wolf that it's a little bit unfair to eat the stray sheep. The wolf retorts that only 25% of the sheep were eaten, and the entire 75% were allowed to safely return to the flock. That, and the system generally benefits everyone - wolfs and sheep. Don't you realize the futility of your argument? The wolf will continue to eat the sheep because that is what wolfs do, and they will come up with any requisite PR to make it look decent.

The only answer is to stop being meaty while within the reach of a wolf, and stop being within the reach before you're about to grow some meat.

Very little of the work done on Google products is directly assigned by Google management. I just finished up a week-long demo that fixes a longstanding annoyance with the search results. I saw a need, made a quick 10-minute screenshot mock-up, gave a 3-minute presentation, recruited a few co-conspirators, and we built it. Management will be involved in the decision whether to productionize and launch it, but the demo was all done at the individual-contributor level.

I've got a 20% project that, to my knowledge, my manager doesn't even know about. It grew out of my 80% project - we needed a library that doesn't seem to exist yet. When it gets to a semi-functional state, I'll open-source it through cdibona's office, with copyright assigned to Google. Why not? It'll end up exactly the same for end-users, with an Apache license, and it's much less of a bureaucratic hassle to just do it with a Google copyright.

None of that is related to cookiecaper's point though. Your project is obviously related to Google, used Google's resources and engineers, and was in response to a problem that Google had.

The point is that Google will claim copyright of everything that you do. If you write a game about chickens in your spare time, for example, then Google owns the copyright, despite not having had any input into it. I fail to see how that's fair or reasonable, and I'd be very interested to see what laws apply - I suspect that cdibona is trying to blow smoke up our collective asses.

In your case it makes sense; you wrote the library at work. Google paid you to sit in Google's building using Google's computers and networks to write the library. If they want to own it, it's not unreasonable at all.

What is unreasonable is that if you did it at home, with no Google resources, that they would still ask you to assign them ownership.

(I, fortunately, don't have this problem. Part of the official open-sourcing process involves deleting any reference to our company, even in the copyright, so that nobody sues them if it breaks. Example internal app that was open-sourced: http://openefs.org/)

Why does my physical location make a difference? I'm free to go home as I please during the workday. If I duck out of work at 3 PM so I can go home and use my own laptop to work on a personal project, should it not be owned by Google? If I work on it in the mornings and come in at noon, should it not be owned by Google?

That's a fine line. If I produce a porn video on my sick day, should Google own it? Would they even want it?

Well, obviously before that phraseology goes into a contract it would need more refinement. A better term is probably "Any work not performed in the course of regular employment duties", or something like that. The point is that Google should not be claiming copyright on things that they have nothing to do with.

This is actually a big can of worms, what with it having so much to do with state, federal and international law and treaty (wipo, amongst others). It is often unfair.

All I can act on from this fairness perspective is Google's interactions with Open Source, making it as easy as possible to release code under open source licenses, which I think we're doing a good job of.

"what with it having so much to do with state, federal and international law and treaty"

Would love to see specific citations showing that Google has no choice but to claim ownership of all its employee's projects during their own free time at home or elsewhere not at work. I thought slavery was banned in most countries, it's amazing to now hear that it is required under international treaty. Greatly looking forward to those specific citations of how specifically Google has no choice in this because of "state, federal and international law and treaty".

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He's gone beyond saying it is a voluntary contract. He said the contract terms being discussed are required under state, federal and international law. Thanks for the downvote!

For the ridiculous slavery analogy. You've got a top Google legal person here explaining his thought process clearly and in honest, not-just-PC terms, and you're waving your arms around. I don't necessarily disagree with your points, but it's bad for discussion.

Anyway, I deleted my comment since I didn't want to get into an argument here, it's not that important to me. I don't even 100% disagree with you, but clean up the tone a little bit and less handwaving? That kind of thing is what makes people want to brush off criticism instead of responding, which is really bad for discussion. I think it's really cool that a person on the Google legal team is explaining their thinking here reasonably and clearly.

I don't think cdibona is a lawyer or on Google Legal. Last I knew he was "director of open-source operations" or something like that. He is a developer I think. I also think he had some involvement with SourceForge back in the day but am not sure.

Chris is the Open Source Programs Manager at Google. He handles open source matters and policies for Google, among other tasks. He is not a developer.

Because it's probably not actually "wholly independent".

Software developers are thought workers, and you don't get to just check your brain at the door when you clock out like you could your tools or a laptop. Thus, any similar* work you do on your own time cannot be done without your brain using some of what is in your head, which you learned/figured out on company time.

* Now, this is the fun part. Where do you draw the similar line?

Think about it: you hire someone to solve a problem. You pay them to figure it out and implement. Then they turn around and implement the same solution, which you paid them to think about, for someone else?

>Thus, any similar work you do on your own time cannot be done without your brain using some of what is in your head, which you learned/figured out on company time.

Should I be writing all my past employers checks because I am using things I learned "on their time"? I had a job where we used CakePHP, and I learned much about the framework during this job; now, should all my future CakePHP work (of which there is hopefully very little) belong to the employer that first facilitated my learning of CakePHP? Should I write a past employer a check when the bad management practices I observed there are avoided due to my past experience? Do they own my wisdom on that subject now?

I think you can see where we're going with this. I think that anything that is not performed in the course of your ordinary job duties, not directly related to the company or its primary businesses, and performed outside of company time and facilities blatantly belongs to its original author.

>Think about it: you hire someone to solve a problem. You pay them to figure it out and implement. Then they turn around and implement the same solution, which you paid them to think about, for someone else?

Uh, yeah, this happens all the time. That's what most consulting firms do. You think when you hire a web firm to build your e-commerce site they always start from scratch on the shopping cart program? The cart was written the first time they had an e-commerce job, and now they reuse it. This is good practice and totally kosher, and should be expected, unless you explicitly request a custom shopping cart program with copyright assignment.

Thus, any similar work you do on your own time cannot be done without your brain using some of what is in your head, which you learned/figured out on company time.

Aside from information that is considered confidential by my employer (in which case it falls under the NDA I signed), what's in my head belongs to me. Yes: me. Just as my employer is able to use knowledge and experience that I've gained from working for previous employers (and on open source projects in my spare time), I must be able to use the knowledge and experience I've gained at my current employer in future (or even current, as long as it's not the same) work.

A huge part of the reason I'm so good at the job I do now is because of the 5 years I spent working on Xfce. If my employer gets to leverage that, then I get to leverage what I've learned at my current job. It's mine, plain and simple.

That may not be exactly what the law says -- it's hard to read it and specifically say what's allowed and what isn't without a lawyer, and even then I'm sure they disagree -- but anything less is knowledge-servitude.

Now, as to the "similar" bit: I think a large company like Google could easily claim that the vast majority of personal projects done by its employees is "similar" enough to something someone somewhere in the company is working on that they are entitled to ownership under current law and policy. Even if it's not related to the work that the employee actually does for the company. And that's not cool.

Yes, I think it's cool that Google is so willing to allow its employees to open source so much Google-owned code. But that's not enough. Look at it the other way: if it's "no big deal" for the employee to assign copyright to Google because it's released under a liberal open source license like BSD, then why isn't it "no big deal" to allow the employee to retain copyright? Aside from prestige, what does Google gain from owning copyright on BSD-licensed code? As a person who writes software, a part of my resume is the body of open source code listed under my copyright. Sure, you can look at commit logs to find out who wrote the code, but it's much less impressive to be a contributor listed under your employer's umbrella.

Think about it: you hire someone to solve a problem. You pay them to figure it out and implement. Then they turn around and implement the same solution, which you paid them to think about, for someone else?

That's perfectly fine, and happening all the time. Google got the fastest JS interpreter among all the major browsers (Chrome's V8) by hiring the guy Sun paid a lot of money to do nothing but think about virtual machines for a couple of years. Just because Sun paid for the development of HotSpot doesn't give them any kind of ownership over the ideas, with one exception: for some ideas, they can get government enforced limited time monopolies for the sake of "promoting the Progress of Science and useful Arts" by filing patents for them.

But how this applies to Google employees, I don't know: it would seem that Google ought not to be able to claim ownership of all of my ideas simply because I work there while having them. That said, I really can't imagine it being much of a problem if someone just stays honest about things (i.e. not work on a major competitor to their own project).

> Software developers are thought workers ...

That is why I think it should go both ways and they should be forced to pay overtime for whenever a worker claims to have "thought" about the problem in their free time.

Imagine the scenario: you are on the beach with the family but, since you are a "thought" worker, your mind wonders so you think for 30 minutes about how to decrease the latency of that DB query. That should be 30 min of overtime billed to Google.

Wouldn't that be the other side of the "thought worker" coin ?

This goes both ways. Things you learn on your own time benefit Google. So why does the copyright only go one way? Why is Google entitled to things it didn't pay for?

I also wonder this regarding the Google Books settlement.

This was how it was put in the book How To Get Rich.

First of all, as far as I am aware, Google has been a very friendly contributor to open source, releasing lots and lots of high quality code, including some really cool stuff that isn't available elsewhere such as GWT or Guice. I'm strongly inclined to give them the benefit of the doubt. Further, reread Chris' first sentence. This isn't just Google being jerks; their policy stems at least in part from CA law.

  So, under California law, which is probably the most liberal in the United States coving IP, you are prescribed
  from competing with your employer even on your own time or on your own equipment.
  This is reinforced in industry employment agreements, including Google's (my employer)
  Most employers take the position that everything you do in the space is logically competitive. 
  Recognizing that, we, Google, make it very easy to get permission to open source things, but under Google copyright.

That said, given their relationship with the web, it's hard to say that any web related tech doesn't compete with them in some fashion. I'd wait for G to actually be dicks before calling them out. Also, being allowed to use 20 percent time to work on this stuff is pretty amazing. I have a bunch of personal projects that I'd love to have a day a week to work on.

That said, given their relationship with the web, it's hard to say that any web related tech doesn't compete with them in some fashion.

... which is really the problem. Google can claim that anything web-related that an employee of theirs does on their own time to be sufficiently related to their business as to assert ownership. And that's not cool.

Just because a company has done good things for the community, it doesn't give them a free pass to do bad things to its employees.

As stated above "We have a process for releasing under your own copyright, but it is not as flexible.".

I think that's entirely fair - if you're a Google employee contributing to a project that might potentially compete with Google, I don't see a problem with Google asking you to get permission.

This is them being dicks! What are you waiting for - Larry Page to come and take a dump on your lawn??

But isn't Google a "Don't be evil" company? Such a moral stance should clearly prompt them to either stop taking code ownership from their engineers' weekend projects (I call it stealing), or they should start paying overtime for that code.

EDIT: Corrected the corporate motto from "Do no evil" to "Don't be evil".

Google's corporate motto is "Don't be evil". That's very different from "Do no evil."

Thank you for correcting.

I don't see how it is that different in practice. Do you mean that there is a loophole, since a company that is "not evil" can clearly "act evil" and still operate according to its principles because of the specific wording of the statement?

"Don't be evil" is a statement about your overall behavior. "Do no evil" is a statement about each individual act you commit. They can often be in conflict when your actions have consequences on other actions (i.e. always).

In this specific example - yes, I think that claiming ownership over everything your employee does is slightly evil (common practice, though). However, without that legal protection, why would you ever share the rest of your IP with the employee? Why would you ever let them work on anything other than their immediately-assigned job duties? You end up with a culture that's fairly similar to most big companies, where employees are told only what they need to do their jobs, and managers tightly control everything that an employee works on. I'd say that's a far worse outcome than a culture where employees know everything that's going on in the company and have wide latitude to start projects that make things better for users. It's worse for employees, it's worse for users, and ultimately it's worse for the company.

Stated another way: you can do bad things if you have good intentions in the end. eg, break the law to defend human rights, etc.

> you are prescribed from competing with your employer even on your own time or on your own equipment.

Why isn't the employer prescribed to not compete with the employees' weekend project?

> Recognizing that, we, Google, make it very easy to get permission to open source things, but under Google copyright.

If you get copyright then do you also pay developers overtime for all that work? If you want to own the code you have to pay for it. Or I guess if you are multi-billion dollar corporation with fully staffed legal team, then I guess you can just take the code, yap, make sense ...

> It's easy to get knee-jerk about this and get upset

Sometimes peoples' gut reactions to what is fair kicks in before corporate newspeak does.

> This system works.

Of course it does -- for Google.

> Googlers can work on Google equipment and during their 20% on these kinds of projects.

No problem with that. If it is Google's equipment and Google's time then Google should own the code. But if it is employees' equipment and time then it is stealing.

> That said, we've cleared about 200 (75% of those requested)

And you stole the other 25%.

"Why isn't the employer prescribed to not compete with the employees' weekend project?"

Because the employer is the one giving money to the employee, not the other way around.

"If you get copyright then do you also pay developers overtime for all that work?"

If you're salaried, there is no such thing as overtime. That's what the word "exempt" means on your tax forms. This is also why Google doesn't care when I get in to work at 1 PM, or when I take an hour long lunch break, or when I spend my whole time going to Tech Talks instead of working. As long as I get my work done over the time periods required by the business, it's none of their business how I spend my day.

Employment law recognizes many different categories of employees. If you're a contractor, you're paid for your work - you and the firm agree precisely on the deliverables, they give you a lump sum for the job, and then it's completely up to you how you build those deliverables. If you're hourly (non-exempt), you're paid for your time - you receive a set hourly wage for each hour that you work, and what you do outside of that is your own business. If you're salaried (exempt), you're paid for your ideas - you can manage your time as you please, but anything you think of relating to the company's business belongs to the company.

You should know exactly what you're signing up for when you sign those employment agreements, and pick the form of employment that suits your goals best. But remember that companies adjust the amount of information they share with each class of information accordingly - no contractor is going to know how Google's search infrastructure or ranking algorithm works, but a former employee will.

>If you're salaried (exempt), you're paid for your ideas - you can manage your time as you please, but anything you think of relating to the company's business belongs to the company.

This is not what salary means. As I explained in another post below, salary is not an unlimited purchase of your ideas, imagination, or energy. Salary is a negotiated pay package that represents a fair cut for the employee because the value he provides is not directly correlated with the hours that he works.

That's why it doesn't matter how you spend your day when you're salaried -- because you and your employer have made an agreement that the amount of time you spend on something is not relevant as long as you're accomplishing the tasks that you're assigned within the terms of the assignment. It's not because Google owns all your software-related ideas over the course of your employment. A company cannot own your thoughts.

> no contractor is going to know how Google's search infrastructure or ranking algorithm works, but a former employee will.

Ironically, the moment said employee becomes former, Google no longer has claim to any work they do. What's at issue here is the extent of their claims on /current/ employees.

> but anything you think of relating to the company's business belongs to the company.

A company can own /ideas/? Copyrights, yes. Patents, yes. But ideas? Not so much.

Even the idea that the company has a blanket claim to anything you set to keyboard or paper outside of the office seems ludicrous and unenforceable. Write a song? Google owns it. Write a poem? Google's. So why would they essentially get a blanket claim to any program you write?

edit: What's protecting Google's secret ranking algorithms is confidentiality, not copyright.

Along the lines of the company's business. Google is a software company in many markets. They can make a reasonable case that any software is along the lines of the company's business. They probably wouldn't win all of them, but it's sufficiently gray that the courts would have to get involved to figure out precisely where the line is, and no employee (or employer, for that matter) wants a lawsuit.

I have friends that work in publishing and journalism, and they have similar problems with their blogs. Their employers don't own any software that they write on their free time, but personal blogs are a gray-enough area that most stick to writing on their employers' official blogs.

Same reason that the DragonLance series is Copyright TSR. Tracy and Laura Hickman dreamed it up on the way to a job interview there, and then the plot and characters were developed while they were employed by the company.

As far as owning ideas - technically, yes, to the extent that those ideas are "reduced to practice". A company can't own what's in your head. But if you write it down, it's technically Copyright (c) 2010, Your Employer.

What if you write a song about Google's business? If an employee of Google writes a song about working on a search engine, does Google own that?

I think that it's silly to presume that a company should own something just because it's the same class of work. Does a newspaper own the diaries or private correspondence of its writers? Why should it own the personal blog? If the work is produced without compensation from the company and without using any company tools or resources, how can anyone make an argument that the company "owns" it just because the originator is employed there?

I can see how non-competes might be enforced to upbraid the release or participation of employees or ex-employees in businesses thought damaging to the employer. But that just gives the employer respite until the term of your non-compete agreement runs out; thereafter, all works should still be owned by their original author, and he is free to do as he pleases. You shouldn't be able just to steal that work without regard to the employee.

> If you're salaried, there is no such thing as overtime.

That makes sense. I am salaried too, but I also have hourly limits. There is a prescription in my employment contract that says I should work at least 8 hours / day. In other words, it is more rigid. I do not have the freedom to finish a project at night, and not show up next day. However there is no restriction on ownership over my own OSS projects.

> you can manage your time as you please, but anything you think of relating to the company's business belongs to the company.

I see. My "unfairness" alarm still goes off a little when companies claim ownership of their workers' weekend intellectual creations, but, of course, in the end it is a voluntary employment and a voluntary contract.

> You should know exactly what you're signing up for when you sign those employment agreements, and pick the form of employment that suits your goals best.

Definitely. It looks like many are advocating negotiating and tweaking the contract. I am from a different country and was a bit naive when I came here and didn't know I could even do that. I'll have to keep that in mind if I switch jobs.

So, has this ever been tested in court? The wording in Illinois law is:

If an employment agreement entered into after January 1, 1984, contains a provision requiring the employee to assign any of the employee's rights in any invention to the employer, the employer must also, at the time the agreement is made, provide a written notification to the employee that the agreement does not apply to an invention for which no equipment, supplies, facility, or trade secret information of the employer was used and which was developed entirely on the employee's own time, unless (a) the invention relates (i) to the business of the employer, or (ii) to the employer's actual or demonstrably anticipated research or development, or (b) the invention results from any work performed by the employee for the employer.

The Act starts off clearly: "the agreement does not apply to an invention for which no equipment, supplies, facility, or trade secret information of the employer was used and which was developed entirely on the employee's own time", but then it gets in to a nasty gray area: "unless the invention relates to the business of the employer".

How do you define this for software? Does an implementation of "malloc" relate to ditch digging because the phones that ditch-diggers carry to be dispatched need to allocate memory?

My employer, Netflix, has a much simpler policy: whatever I create that relates to Netflix's business belongs to Netflix, and whatever else I create belongs to me.

That's literally how the contract is worded.

We have very few written policies, but the ones we do have are typically short and simple like that. Take the expense policy, for example. There are no lists of things you can or can't expense. The policy just says, "act in Netflix's best interest." It's up to you to act responsibly.

This policy is probably preventing hundreds of new startups from being created every year if you think about it. Since most people work on their startups while keeping their day jobs.

Imagine if every company in the country had this policy. Our economy would grind to a halt.

Is there a major US company doesn't have that policy?

Some don't enforce it. If a claim is not enforced it loses validity over time, so check with your lawyer - these will be some of the best $500 you spent.

I don't know for sure, but I've worked for medium sized companies that don't have it.

You are incorrect that this is California. From one message at the link: "Thanks for the advice, but I don't work in California."

California law is pretty clear, if you do it on your own time, on your own equipment, it's yours. Most other states have a "unless related to something your employer does, or maybe might do, or they feel like" clause, but California does not allow that.

Thanks Chris, that clears things up and generally makes sense.

I never much minded similar constraints when I worked as an employee at a company. OTOH, trying to constrain own-time works of part time consultants is annoying (but that is not the case here).