Comment by dctoedt | Hacker News Reader

Comment by dctoedt | Hacker News Reader

1. For inventions, several U.S. states have law protecting employee's off-duty rights in a manner somewhat similar to California. See:

Del. Code. Ann. 805 http://delcode.delaware.gov/title19/c008/index.shtml

765 Ill. Code 1060 http://law.justia.com/illinois/codes/2005/chapter62/2238.htm...

Minn. Stat. 181.78 https://www.revisor.mn.gov/statutes/?id=181.78

N.C. Gen. Stat. 66-57.1 http://law.onecle.com/north-carolina/66-commerce-and-busines...

Wash. Rev. Code 49.44.140 http://apps.leg.wa.gov/rcw/default.aspx?cite=49.44.140

(This list is taken from a treatise on software law I published a number of years back; more states may have enacted similar laws since then.)

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2. For copyright ownership, in the U.S., and I think in quite a few other countries, a company's ownership of an employee's "work of authorship" would depend on whether the work was either:

(i) a work made for hire, usually meaning created "within the scope of employment" - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Work_for_hire ; or

(ii) assigned to the employer - which an employment contract might require the employee to do.

Thanks very much for those citations. I find it quite telling that three of the States with this protection are California, Washington and North Carolina. Pretty sure those are the top states in the US for software innovation. I can see how the two are connected too. Employees retain rightful ownership of their work they do at home for themselves. Many of these employees will then leave and found new, innovative creative companies using the things they made on their own dime using their own personal resources. In States where the rights of people to the fruits of their labor are not respected, there is no where near as much innovation, no where near as many new companies and products and employment growth.

I think the high concentration of tech jobs and employee-favorable IP ownership legislation are a great combination for the states you mention. Causality could easily work either way here though. CA, WA, and NC are some of the only states with enough tech companies and tech employees to care about this stuff. Software has a much more favorable cost structure than most industries; employees can easily fully implement their ideas on their own time and their own dime. So it makes sense that these issues have come up enough often enough in the legal system, or tech companies/employees have lobbied hard enough, to fully flesh out the legislation on the matter in these states.

California's law prohibits employment contracts from assigning copyright to the employer in works they do outside of work hours without employer equipment that doesn't relate to the employer's business, which narrows the scope of your 2(ii) considerably.

I think I'd like to read your treatise. Can you post a link?

The treatise is The Law and Business of Computer Software, published by West Publishing (now a unit of Thomson Reuters). It has another author's name on the second edition, per my contract with the publisher, because I stopped doing the annual updates after 12 years, which also means I no longer get royalties so I have no financial interest in posting the link: http://west.thomson.com/productdetail/175187/13515117/produc...

I resurrected a diagramming approach I tried some years back to show what an employer would have to prove to get ownership of an employee's off-duty invention - see http://www.ontechnologylaw.com/2010/12/diagramming-a-legal-i....

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