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Google claims copyright on employee side projects

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738 pointszoobab384 comments

> Oh, please. It's standard industry practice for companies to claim ownership of everything a software engineer comes up with, even "on their own time".

In the US. Problem is the US is infecting the rest of the world too, especially through subsidiaries which basically just translate from English the 'standard' employment contract.

I had to refuse employment in Romania since the clauses were so broad and basically illegal under Romanian law. (Of course, I had no interest in proving in court they were illegal but the contract was reviewed by an attorney on my side).

So, yeah, maybe apply some logic. If the employer owns your brain 24h/day maybe the hourly rate your are getting is not such a great deal.

And don't get me stared on clauses the survive the contract, including multi-year employment bans to competitors, etc. For a large multinational that basically mean you have to get a job landscaping or something because they compete with anybody would offer you a comparable job for your skills.

This 'standard industry practice' should die.

Can confirm from my experience (~10 years in the industry). I've never even heard of this practice until I applied to Google. None of the EU companies I've worked at before had anything like this. None of the EU companies I've worked at since had anything like this.

It's US imperialism, nothing less.

I think you make an excellent point, in particular regarding the fact that this is a US-based policy.

US copyright law is extremely friendly to individual creators at the expense of corporations. It makes corporations bend over backwards to avoid getting into a messy legal dispute with somebody that they've employed to create for them. This policy is so broad because if an individual Google employee were to try and claim that basically anything they came up with (including things that were, common sense dictates, done as work for Google) had been done on their own time, the burden of proof would be on Google to prove otherwise.

> US copyright law is extremely friendly to individual creators at the expense of corporations.

You must be joking! Yes, the "Work made for hire" requirements are convoluted, but most of the complexity applies only to independent contractors anyways. I have never heard of a US corporation be in danger because of an employee claiming copyright, yet people's personal projects and own companies constantly get screwed by former employers.

See, for example, the entire history of IP in comics, which Disney is now using to print money.

Yeah, about that, there was an artist named Ken Penders who worked on Archie's Sonic the Hedgehog comics. He sued Archie and Sega over the characters he created for the Sonic stories. Apparently work-for-hire due diligence was not done on Archie and Sega's part, because rather than squash him like a bug they settled out of court saying in effect: "go away, and take your stupid characters with you".

So apparently, companies do have to go through a few hoops to make their claim on their employees' IP airtight.

Please cite relevant statutes or case law. It's pretty easy to write a contract that only assigns copyright to the corporation for works that were created on company time. That is standard practice for pretty much every job, including non-tech ones.

Except Google is one of many corporations that exploit passion for the work their employees are doing to get hundreds of extra hours out of them off the clock.

You're right, it's very easy for them to say "only work at work" but they don't want to do that, so instead, anything created by employees is their IP.

When does company time start and end for a salaried employee? If I'm working on a side project and get paged to look at something for work, does work time start when I look at the alert? Am I on work time if I answer a work email on a work device with my personal laptop open doing side work at 3 am?

I mean, if it was done on non-Google hardware, off Google property, and using resources that you paid for / own, then I can't see any problems with that. They can still argue that it competes with their core business, but they would have to provide some justification if they wanted to fire you for cause or have the IP assigned to them. I guess they can just terminate you for no reason (I think?), but that's the risk you take.

The possible need to prove that an employee's work was done on company time (which is a vaguely-defined notion for US salary employees in the era of remote work) or with company hardware is a huge hassle for the employer, which can probably shed light on why they'd use blanket assume-ownership-of-copyright agreements, so long as employees are willing to sign such agreements.

Germany has an entire law around this which came into force 1957: https://www.gesetze-im-internet.de/arbnerfg/__49.html

Many work contracts don't have clauses for inventions related to your field of employment because there's no ambiguity.

Most patches would not fall under the law, but entire libaries or novel approaches might. (basically anything patent-worthy)

IIUC this governs patentable inventions, not copyright.

No, it also covers technical improvements that are not patentable: https://www.gesetze-im-internet.de/arbnerfg/__3.html

That's just defining the term. AFAICT the law only says that an employee has a right to receive fair compensation for a technical improvement in some cases. It explicitly says that apart from that, procedures covering technical improvements are a matter of contracts: https://www.gesetze-im-internet.de/arbnerfg/__20.html

This is the point I think the tweeter and a lot of commenters on here miss.

In the EU all those laws are part of the statutory employment law /eu directives and not in an individuals contract - so employees don't ever know about that unless they know about employment law.

> so employees don't ever know about that unless they know about employment law.

I'd really recommend all employees to read up at least on the generics of employment law. No need to read up on the edge cases, but the general law is pretty clear and not too long.

I work in the US and have always had side-projects, and have never signed anything which would give my employer the rights to them. I think this isn't just a US thing, but a US mega-corporate thing, maybe?

Mega-corps have a) broader domains of "what's relevant" and b) more lawyers to actually take action on this stuff. Those are the only real differences. I've turned down jobs with even smaller companies over this.

I hadn't seen this until recently. It seems to be pushed by VCs and the tech megacorps, so if you work at a VC-backed startup it's likely in your contract or if you work for one of the bigger tech companies. I believe IBM had this for a long time. If you're working for a company outside of "pure tech", it's much rarer

I think it depends on how tech-focused your company is. Things like Google, Amazon and Bell Labs, sure, things like J.B Hunt and JG Wentworth (It's my patent and I want it NOW!) not so much.

Depending where you work in the US you may have not needed to sign anything because your employer already has that right by default. For example that is true in New York.

It will never get enforced unless there is some other conflict.

You haven't heard about this because it's illegal in many (most?) places outside US.

It's not illegal in Europe except maybe Germany and that's more because of not being able to assign moral rights in work for hire than anything to do with at work/not at work.

I work in Europe and every company I've ever worked for has had a substantially similar clause.

It's legal and automatic that the company has rights to invetions you came up with at work (if invention is associated in any way with your tasks) but company has no right to anything you do, think or create outside of your working hours with your own equipment.

That's the way it is in Poland.

If I remember correctly, I had similar or worse in my employment contracts in France.

Worse being "your skills are to be used exclusively for the benefit of Employer". That means that you can't do freelance work, or open source contributions. In theory, you're not even permitted to fix your parents printer.

"Honey, can you carry my shopping into the kitchen?" - "I'm sorry, my skills are to be used exclusively for the benefit of my employer."

Those are not the type of skills listed in your job description (which is part of your contract).

The argument still stands.

"Honey, can you take a look at why this script isn't compiling the shopping list correctly?"

"Sorry, my skills are to be used exclusively for the benefit of my employer."

have never seen this clause in canada and it seems like something that would not be upheld in the courts either (cf. non compete clauses)

Non-compete clauses are not automatically illegal in Canada, just like most US states (California is a famous exception). The courts usually look at a lot of specifics based on case law to determine what they consider reasonable. For any individual clause they might throw it out, modify it (unsure if this is an option in all provinces), ornl enforce it.

Without diving into the ins-and-outs of this, my current contract contains a claim like this. Well outside the US, and the UK/EU - it's in South East Asia.

It says something like "on company equipment" and/or "reasonably related to skills/knowledge gained or applicable during employment with the company".

So I wouldn't quite quote this as being US imperialism. I seem to recall similar clauses in my previous contracts, but can't swear on it.

My take is the "skills/knowledge gained or applicable with the company bit": if its in my company's core market, then sure. If it's from training they paid for/provided (say - I don't know - Kotlin, if I didn't already know Kotlin) then OK.

But if I make a PHP/JS app, in my own time, in an unrelated market, then they can bite me for it. Obviously, in a more litigious environment, some people may not want to take that risk.

the problem with that is that you "gain skill" in their programming language when you work there. And you "gain skill" as a programmer...

>reasonably related to skills/knowledge gained or applicable during employment with the company

Let's imagine that you didn't know how to read and write before being employed at that company. If you learn how to read and write during your employment then the company owns rights to anything you write? And they own the rights to anything you make that requires reading too.

This clause essentially tells the employee to go out of their way not to learn anything new while employed at the company. Does the company, by chance, offer training in very broad skills to employees "free of charge"?

Let's not imagine a ridiculous hypothetical where someone gets a job without knowing how to read. That doesn't make any sense as an analogy. Learning how to read is not any domain specific skill anyway, if you work for a pharmaceutical company they don't give a shit if you write, unless you are spilling company secrets.

I don't know. Lots of people learn to write different kinds of code at work. I also think writing code isn't domain specific as I've never worked in the same industry twice over 6+ jobs.

Seems pretty comparable

Suppose you learn Japanese at work ... can't you use that knowledge in the field?

In the EU, the universities sometimes use this logic, so it's not totally unknown here either.

I first encountered this at SCEE in 2008.

Remember Anthony Levandowski?

That's nonsense. In Germany the default for contracts is that you need your employers permission to do side projects. Germany is in the EU.

No, that's nonsense. Just because Germany does it doesn't mean the parent commenter's experience in other EU countries is invalid.

European employment law is pretty unified, so it does at least suggest a significant commonality.

He claimed it is an US only thing and US imperialism. The example of Germany refutes that. So it is nonsense.

But funny how you choose to believe his personal experience, rather than mine. All hail the narrative.

That's nonsense.

> In Germany the default for contracts is that you need your employers permission to do side projects.

You generally need to notify your employer if you take on a second (paid) job. The employer may veto that employment, but must specify a good reason (you can't be in competition, exceed the total legal working hours, bring ill repute to your employer, ...), but the default is "allow". Clauses that require approval are generally not enforceable. As always, there are exceptions depending on the exact circumstances. See for example this discussion (in german) https://www.haufe.de/personal/arbeitsrecht/top-thema-nebenbe...

You generally don't need permission to do open source work, though the ownership of inventions that qualify under the ArbnErfG may fall to the employer. As such, it's good to get clarification and explicit approval from your employer beforehands.

(not legal advice, ...)

I suspect in Germany not informing your employer about other jobs would end badly for you

I'm not a lawyer, so take this with a grain of salt. I'm an employer, though, so I was incentivized to read up a little on employment law (you learn a lot of things you never wanted to know...)

German labor courts are most of the time well aware of the power imbalance between employer and employee. Even we, as a tiny company could bring more legal resources and funds to bear than most of our employees. So courts usually favor the employee.

Given that, I'd expect that the result would largely depend on how bad the infraction rates. If you failed to report a job that the employer could not have vetoed on any grounds, I'd generally expect a slap on the wrist (Abmahnung, "written warning") or such as the result. Worst case regular termination. On cases where the employee failed to report a side job that could or would have been vetoed, immediate termination with cause is possible - the link I posted above cites such a case. If the side job caused damages, suing for damages would be possible. However, suing for damages requires you to prove damages, which will be hard in many cases.

So I'd really recommend that as an employee you dutifully report when you plan to take on a second job - just be sure to phrase it as such: Don't make it a request. It's a notice.

That wasn't my experience, but most employers actually referenced that case in their contract, so I am not sure what the default rule is.

Also, a second job is one thing. What about ownership of things you produce in your spare time? I don't think the former necessarily covers the latter.

> That wasn't my experience, but most employers actually referenced that case in their contract, so I am not sure what the default rule is.

The law is as the law is and the law is clear: Without good reason, no employer can forbid you taking on a second job. Now, employers pulling shenanigans in their employment contracts is not entirely uncommon - either due to lack of knowledge or trying to intimidate their employees. That's why it's good to know to have a general idea what the law says - because the law trumps the contract.

> What about ownership of things you produce in your spare time? I don't think the former necessarily covers the latter.

No, it doesn't. This is covered by the ArbnErfG (Gesetze über Arbeitnehmererfindungen) https://www.gesetze-im-internet.de/arbnerfg/index.html#BJNR0...

In a very short and inaccurate summary: Your employer can claim inventions that cross a certain threshold that are related to your work. You're entitled to compensation. Your employer can also claim a (nonexclusive) license for inventions that do not relate to your job, but relate to any of their areas of business under fair and reasonable terms (in doubt, a court gets to decide). You must notify your employer of any such invention.

Obviously, trade secrets or code that your employer owns the copyrights for is off limits for any of your spare time work.

It still seems to me the latter is a problem for people working on their side projects in their spare time. Like if you are a software developer, and develop some software at home, it is kind of related to your job.

Here is some more information (in German): https://www.nebenjob.de/ratgeber/2479-ihr-recht-auf-den-zwei...

If your second job leads to the total of your work taking up more than 48 hours per week, your employer can forbid it. Likewise if you work in your holidays.

I don't think it is as straightforward as you make it sound.

I did a group project in my senior year of college, working with a US division of a German company, and they needed us to sign an NDA, which was far more egregious than anything Google requires. One part of it was:

>The Undersigned agrees that any inventions or ideas in whole or part conceived or made by the undersigned during or after the term of their relationship with $COMPANY [...] shall be considered part of the Confidential Information for purposes of this Agreement.

Basically saying they own everything I invent forever. I responded to them, basically saying this was ridiculous, and they said it's "generally implied" that this only applied to the context of the project, but they could amend it to make that explicit it if I wanted. I said yes, and after several weeks they sent us a revised version.

But I didn't have much of a choice in this; this project is a requirement to graduate. My friend, working with another company that also required an NDA, refused to sign it and basically fought with the school of engineering administration over it. He ended up finding a new project to work on by himself, on an open-source product, so it didn't require an NDA.

It is highly questionable whether such an agreement would be enforceable in Germany.

It's Google imperialism. We don't have a similar clause at Microsoft if you use your own equipment and your own time.

Having seen the employment agreements for both, I can confidently say that Google's clause is the same as Microsoft's. Microsoft may be less strict about enforcing it, but the language was the same.

It's entirely possible that at Microsoft nobody cares and it's an unwritten rule that you can do what you want, while Google has explicit policies which have the effect of chilling things further when they don't work.

Let people do nothing and they will do whatever they want. Let people do a little bit and they'll be scared out of doing any more, for fear of having that little bit taken away, or being made to look ungrateful for what they were allowed. Which is exactly what happened/is happening to me, when cdibona banned me from the corp processes, and now when tytso etc are saying I should've been thankful.

Actually its UK law that this descends from and it is only "related" works. If you where a semi pro musician google would not own the rights to your song's for example.

And it not copyright they "own" it - I suspect the tweeter is confused between intellectual property and copyright

Germany has this http://www.mondaq.com/germany/x/645260/Patent/Artificial+Int...) which is similar its probably EU countries relay on statutory law and don't explicity put it into the contract so you would never know

This is standard practice in Australia and has been for many decades. I came across this practice in the late 80's and early 90's and it became even more common and egregious as time went on. At the time, the company I was working for decided to update the employment contracts of all of its employees and we were all supposed to sign these new contracts having these "ownership" clauses in them. I know I didn't and there were many of my collegues didn't as well, but every new employee didn't have a choice. When I hit the 00's and went contracting, I was able to change my basic contract to avoid this on occasions. On others I was not able to get the appropriate changes made. As a contractor though, the "ownership" clause were less demanding. But still, I basically had to stop work on all my side projects (all of them, even outside of the software field) during each employment contract.

These days I can do what I like and don't have to worry about any company interfering. This is a consequence of no longer being employed in any such field.

Please don't throw gratuitous nationalistic flamebait into HN comments. We'll get gratuitous nationalistic flamewars that way. Those don't help anybody.

Your comment would be fine without that last bit.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

> If the employer owns your brain 24h/day maybe the hourly rate your are getting is not such a great deal.

If you're a software engineer for Google, it's a pretty good hourly rate.

Not if they claim ownership on your side projects.

Google pay their engineer outrageous salary.

Yes, and we’re all just temporarily embarrassed millionaires.

At Google engineer rates, that would not necessarily be an unreasonable assessment.

While I definitely wouldn't claim that the Google software engineer compensation package is enough to buy everyone's side projects---obviously, because some people consider theirs priceless---I suspect it's enough for a lot of engineers to be willing to sign that away (especially given that there is a process for having the company explicitly relinquish their copyright claim back to the creator).

It’s not just a claim on some pseudo-equivalence with respect to hourly rate. It’s a claim on the possible future earnings resulting from the activity.

Future earnings that would be reflected in the share values of the stock that Google granted to the employee that created the copyrightable material.

In the case of those 6-digit salaries that Google engineers get, I admit it's not entirely unreasonable. If they really do want to own all your ideas and they're willing to pay extra for it, then why not? But know what you're agreeing to. And it's certainly not reasonable for a company paying you 5 figures to expect to own everything you think of.

> I had to refuse employment in Romania since the clauses were so broad and basically illegal under Romanian law.

If it's illegal, it's void, isn't it? (Maybe Romania does it differently?)

Do you _really_ want to go against Google's lawyers in court?

But it's still against my principles to sign a contract that has clauses I know to be illegal, and that I would never agree with if they weren't.

No actually in the Eu its pretty much legal - with restrictions.

EU law is fairly common across all states so there will be something like the "Masters and Servants" laws that US and UK law has.

It doesn't make a lot of sense to sign a contract you know to be illegal, though. Better get it out before you sign it. And it being illegal is a very good argument for getting it out. If the company has a problem with that, you know the company intends to make a problem out of it in the future.

I always ask that this specific clause be removed, and if they refuse I don't go work for them.

I don't really understand how people don't get offended at the idea of a company owning any work that you do. At that point you've lost your autonomy as a human being.

Yep. My creative life is my lifeblood. Signing it away would be literally selling my soul.

There are certain things employers put in their contracts even though they know 100% it is non enforceable due to being illegal etc. Years ago when I was an employee it was common practice in IT(in UK) to have a non-compete clause in your employment contract that said: "if you leave you can't work for a competition for 6-12 months". When I looked into it I found out statements like this are unenforceable under UK law as it would basically deny a person a right to work and one can't sign off right's that are inalienable just like one can't sell himsel/herself into slavery.

The process to enforce such a statement in UK would be for the past employer to obtain a court injunction requesting a past employee stops working for competition. I was told almost all such injunction requests are declined as unreasonable. The only exception is if the statement was severely limited by geography. So for example if the contract says: "you can't work for competition in 5 mile radius" it may be enforceable, unless your whole home town is 10 miles across and the statement basically bans you from working in your profession where you live - then no court will grant an injunction like this.

So why did employers put that into their contracts if they knew it can't be enforced? I think they did it to discourage employees from going to competition. Finding out that it is unenforceable requires some googling and one may have doubts about their specific situation. I'm not sure how it is now. My experience with this is over 10 years old.

This is all well and good, until you end your employment at a firm that is extremely vengeful, and as a deterrent to other employees, does in fact decide to take you to court and make your life miserable for several months. Because, remember; you don't have to be guilty to be dragged into court.

Having worked for one such company, who made a spectacle out of punishing disloyal former employees way past the point of what the legal system is built for (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18499712 ), and then holding staff meetings to announce how they've just destroyed that employees life (he wasn't the first, and while he actually did break the law, it's very Arguable the Quadrature guys did not), I took the safe choice sitting out my non compete period and took a nice long holiday.

I'll repeat the most important part of this story;

You don't have to be guilty to be dragged into court.

I made a similar argument in a previous HN thread [1] and people were absolutely incredulous over this idea that not only do companies try to own everything you do but that you don't have to be guilty to be sued by a vengeful employer.

I'll repeat here what I said there. A lot of engineers cannot work on projects in their free time due to being locked into horrible contracts that assert copyright and ownership over anything they do in their free time. Which has a chilling effect on engineers who would otherwise contribute to FOSS. Even if those provisions are illegal, it still costs a lot of money to strike them down in court and the court system is generally always stacked in favor of the corporation.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21771325

Not just USA this time.

Readers might be interested in this recent case in the UK Supreme Court regarding employee compensation for "outstanding benefits" from an employee's invention (Unilever made £24M selling it, he got his wage).

https://www.ipwatchdog.com/2019/10/28/uk-supreme-court-rules...

It frames the fact that employers claim ownership, and have for decades, but that UK IP law, at least, does something about that.

> So, yeah, maybe apply some logic. If the employer owns your brain 24h/day maybe the hourly rate your are getting is not such a great deal.

> And don't get me stared on clauses the survive the contract, including multi-year employment bans to competitors, etc. For a large multinational that basically mean you have to get a job landscaping or something because they compete with anybody would offer you a comparable job for your skills.

> This 'standard industry practice' should die.

Addressing things like these would be a good thing for a tech workers union to take up.

Most of the places I've worked at, this is standard practice if stuff you're developing is on their time and they're paying you.

I have gotten around this by having a list of side-projects I'm working on that give a brief description of what they are and that the business has no claim on them. I attach this to the contract/NDA as an addendum in order to protect myself. I have yet to have a company make a claim on anything I've ever put on the list.

As far as multi-year NDA's, I work in a state where these rarely if ever hold up. The only limitations in these is if you're going to work for a direct competitor. Which means if you're a Ford engineer and you're going to work for Chevy. Then the courts could ban you from working at Chevy for a few years, but your company can't keep you from being gainfully employed anywhere. If you're able to be employed as an engineer elsewhere, it will hold up in court. But trying to keep someone from working in their chosen field at another company doesn't go well in court.

I had one incident with a company who tried that and I took them to court. First day judge just laughed and told the company attorney that you can't legally keep someone from being gainfully employed just because you want to keep them from working at another company that also develops software. A few objections from the company's attorney got struck down immediately and I was out of there in a less than an hour.

What I learned about IP rights in uni, it also works like that in the Netherlands. But I'm not sure if bosses are difficult about it in practice. The one time it was relevant for me, I gave my boss a heads up and it was fine.

It's how the law works so it applies automatically. It has to be the same type of work, though. But one example of that was a webdeveloper building a website for his local sports team.

It's illegal in California as well (as the Twitter poster discovered when he actually examined the CA labor code).

This doesn't apply to the US as a whole. Each state is (sometimes radically) unique.

https://www.faircompetitionlaw.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/1...

Does society accept this behaviour outside tech? Imagine that a Michelin restaurant would claim copyright on the dishes cooked by the chef in his spare time. Or that the big farm would ask for a piece of those carrots grown in the back yard.

Lots of people are employed with an understanding that they won't compete with the employer.

Google's stance is on the aggressive end of things, but that's where the California law is coming from.

The problem with an aggressive stance is that the response is then likely combative as well.

Google isn't alone in this. Plenty of other companies have the same clauses. They already know these clauses have consequences but they are trying to address real fears / visible threats of their own.

All that said, <humor style=wry> I'm fairly sure unionisation and other reactive responses such as further government red tape wont bother them at all. </humor>

There are a lot of things different in the "real" world and the "software" world.

Nobody would accept underwear with a build in camera, gps tracker and a microphone wo give the data to x companys. But with a cellphone (almost) everybody is ok. Also if something goes wrong with software, it's the customers problem. The customer accepted the contract with no rights for him (software AS IS, no warranty), nobody would accept a such contract in the "real" world.

> The customer accepted the contract with no rights for him (software AS IS, no warranty)

That's only specific to FOSS.

Specifically, it's only the case for unsupported project bits that the user doesn't pay for. Commercial FOSS products have the same sort of warranty and support as any other software product.

There are some cases of of selling products without much in the way of guarantees. Something you buy on eBay AS IS is pretty much only warrantied to be as described.

Have you read Windows TOS ?

Nearly every bit of software you use has that wording in its EULA.

Wait on earth would a Michelin restaurant be able to ‚claim copyright‘ on what one of their chefs does in his free time? As long as said cook doesn‘t say „Michelin star chef from Restaurant X is offering you this dish‘ (which would possibly be a trademark issue, but still not copyright) I don‘t see how this could possibly be forbidden.

Everybody is allowed to have more than one job if they please. It‘s just that software ‚creations‘ outside of work are trying to be owned by the (main) employer company.

I mean, the restaurant claiming copyright on e.g. recipies is the same situation as whatever is going on here.

You can't copyright (in the US) a recipe, but the recipe might be considered a trade secret, which effectively can be treated similarly

> Everybody is allowed to have more than one job if they please.

In my country, it's generally illegal to work for a company also work for a competitor. It's a breach of the duty of loyalty to your employer.

It's also that way in the US, but this is going a step further....

Many US employers require you to disclose your side projects (even those you start before joining them). My current employer requires I also tell them of any other business entities I have a relationship with (even unrelated to my job). This then informs them of what IP/consulting fees they can go after if they want to. This is essentially what the Russian Rambler / Nginx issue is claiming to.

It's not fair, just another big corporate overreach because employees have, in the past, made products that might complete, or using work-related IP (including consulting, which leverages work-related knowledge), or using work equipment... and corps lobbied and litigated to essentially soften any defense an employee can claim to retain ownership

Recipes cannot be copyrighted.

https://www.copyright.gov/circs/circ33.pdf

>Everybody is allowed to have more than one job if they please.

If you have some knowledge worker-type job, your company is highly unlikely to have any problem if you make some pottery on the weekends and sell it. [Although I have no doubt there are overreaching employee agreements.] But even companies with pretty liberal employment contracts around IP, open source contributions, etc. are quite likely to have a problem if you set yourself up as a consultant on the side in a way that's either competitive or a conflict of interest.

This is common behavior in any business or industry that protects its interests via intellectual property. Monsanto comes to mind with your big farm reference.

This is mostly a US thing. If I don't implement a DIRECT competitor to my company in my free time, the company can do absolutely nothing about it here. IF I implement a competitor and put it on the market, they can fire me. They can't however, sue me for the posession of the software. That's just a legal nightmare in the US.

Where is 'here'? Curious

Post history indicates Germany.

The situation in Germany about ownership of stuff you developed in your company or spare time is substantially more nuanced than the GGP post describes. Matters get even more complicated when remote work and trust based working hours (aka: no time tracking) gets in the mix. Add permission to work on OSS in your working hours: Was that code done on company time or not?

There's an entire law about inventions made in your on and off time - the "Gesetz über Arbeitnehmererfindungen". It does cover inventions (patents or similar) that are related to your work, whether done during your work time or outside. (https://www.gesetze-im-internet.de/arbnerfg/__4.html)

The law stipulates compensation and there's a separate set of compensation guidelines that takes into account how related to your work this invention is.

An employer can even claim right of first buy for inventions that are unrelated to the employees work (freie Erfindung), if the employer is active in the area of business that the invention covers (see https://www.gesetze-im-internet.de/arbnerfg/__19.html)

Mind you, this is by law. Many employment contracts will only mention this in passing or not at all.

Now, most contributions to open source will not pass the bar to be an invention in the sense of the law. But if you come up with a novel solution for a hard problem, that might cross the boundaries.

Similar in Sweden, although most contracts allow for some compensation surrounding if you create a competing product without disclosing it.

A competing product != Any and everything you code

My point exactly, it needs to be in direct competition.

Assuming you mean germany? In germany your company can not sue you for ownership of the software, but they can sue for all the earnings you made with it.

I was in a similar situation where I had an idea for a similar product the company I worked for was toying around but was not able to implement. In the end I quit, waited a few month and then implemented it, just to be sure.

Yeah, my contract is similar. Anything that's somehow a direct competitor or related would be covered, but other projects would be just fine.

Animation studios will try and make you sign contracts that say they own anything and everything you pitch to them, regardless of whether they pick it up.

You can get around this or have the contracts modified if you have good representation, but most artists don’t or can’t afford to. I also know for a fact that studios use these clauses to mine and steal ideas from struggling artists.

IMO, America is far too biased overall towards employer versus employee rights and this is a problem in a lot of fields.

Intellectual Property and Copyright aren't quite the same thing. The IP is the idea, whereas the copyright is the specific recipe.

So in my mind, the equivalent would be using your learned cooking skills for another restaurant while working at a Michelin restaurant. They both serve food (competing or related industry), but while the dishes are different, the techniques to create them come from the same source.

I wouldn't expect a Michelin restaurant to stop someone cooking in their spare time, just that they can't copy their exact dishes in part or full and compete with them.

Intellectual Property isn't really a thing in itself. It's a vague collection of a couple of different concepts, including Copyright, Patents and Trademarks.

Those are three very different kinds of temporary monopolies granted by the government, but the people who promote the phrase "intellectual property" want them to be considered as not a government-granted monopoly on a certain kind of business, but as a natural form of property comparable to physical property, which it really isn't.

Perhaps we could try to rebrand IP as "Innovation Protections"?

Good idea but will not pass the parliementarians.

"Property" isn't natural. It's defined by law.

> Intellectual Property and Copyright aren't quite the same thing. The IP is the idea, whereas the copyright is the specific recipe.

No. Intellectual property is property.

One cannot "own" an idea, but one can own a copyright; copyright (along with trademark and patent) is a form of IP.

> Intellectual Property and Copyright aren't quite the same thing. The IP is the idea, whereas the copyright is the specific recipe.

No. "Intellectual Property" is an umbrella term for some very different concepts -- copyrights, patents, trademarks, trade secrets (maybe I'm forgetting some).

You can't copyright an idea, but you might be able to patent it. It's only intellectual property if you do.

Plant variety rights.

The European Commission even published a document trying to 'reinterpret' the meaning of IP, they ended up redefining what was 'intellectual property' by making their own maximalist list of rights, including the ones that don't exist yet.

If a chef makes a cookery vlog, at home, should the restaurant that employs them get the proceeds?

"Imagine that a Michelin restaurant would claim copyright on the dishes cooked by the chef in his spare time."

Not a Michelin restaurant, but apparently Outback Steakhouse makes that exact claim.

"Inventions, Ideas, Processes, and Designs. All inventions, ideas, recipes, processes, programs, software, and designs ...conceived or made by Employee during the course of Employee’s employment with the Employer (whether or not actually conceived during regular business hours) and for a period..."

https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/874691/0001193125081...

"WHEREAS, the Employee desires, on the terms and conditions stated herein, to be employed by the Employer as President."

Seems reasonable for the President of the company. Do they make waiters and line cooks sign a similar contract?

Those contracts aren't public. My guess is yes for "head chef" or similar, because why would you put the word "recipe" in a President's contract? That boilerplate came from somewhere else.

That's slavery with extra steps...

I'm partially unclear on how this affects either party. Recipes are explicitly not copyrightable. "Ideas" also seem like an unprotected asset outside of specific NDAs.

Maybe just as a "trade secret" that you're not allowed to share outside the company. (Edit, yes...there's an NDA section that calls out recipies)

Yes this is extremely common outside of "tech."

Almost all large employers will make all employees (even the janitor) sign an ownership of inventions agreement as a condition of employment.

Here's an example of such an agreement from a pharmaceutical company I found (section 2.3 and 2.4): https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1245104/000119312512...

See also: https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2016/12/09/developers-side-pr... for an explanation of why this is.

Pharmaceuticals are tech. The only non tech IP industries are things like art.

I've now had two long-term jobs at large employers, both hospital systems, neither made me sign an IP agreement of any sort. On the university side there absolutely are provisions with faculty in terms of IP ownership. But for hospital employees, it just isn't a consideration. They're not in the IP business, they're in healthcare.

Yes it happens outside tech too. It happens in the food business, manufacturing, industrial design; everywhere companies employ people to produce IP.

In Germany this isn't even a thing.

Have you tried it? One still has “Anzeigepflicht des Arbeitnehmers” (duty to report). And then your boss has a right to forbid your activity. It is a very thing in Germany.

I have no knowledge of this, I am reacting purely to your comment and the Twitter thread:

But 'duty to report' is not the same as 'everything you do is ours'.

The duty to report sounds more like "you are not allowed to have another job next to this one unless you get approval". Which in some cases is logical: an employer wants you to be on your A-game, but if you work 2 other jobs you might be tired all day and not deliver any good work.

Have you? This is only relevant if your invention is in direct competition to the business at hand.

I am building electrical measurement equipment daily and tried to sell couple peripherals for Raspberry Pi as side project. The stupid thing is, that you don’t decide what’s in direct competition. That decides a lawyer and I got rejection since both were electrical systems :-))

Sorry to hear that. That's seriously fucked up, and I am almost sure that it wouldn't stand in court

>> that you don’t decide what’s in direct competition. That decides a lawyer

No. If in doubt a court decides it, not an encroaching law department -- but nobody wants that to happen so everyone silences themselves beforehand...

Just one more reason for me never to be employed by a company with more than 150 employees

It's not: See https://www.gesetze-im-internet.de/arbnerfg/__18.html You must report everything that is not clearly and obviously unrelated to an employers business. That's different from "direct competition". The circumstances under which an employer can make claims to it are more nuanced: If it's related to a field that the employer has business in or is preparing to have business in, they get a right of first buy for at least a non-exclusive license. And that's the problem with google: They do basically everything IT-related. Whatever you might invent - it will likely be related to field google is in or is preparing to be in.

Are you sure this applies to open source contributions? I always thought this would only apply to commercial side projects or inventions. Open source contributions don't seem to fit in either of those categories.

yep, it's accepted in other fields. the craziest for me has to be the music/sound industry. you could spend months coming up with the right chords just to have some big label or famous person you don't have any relationship with come after you.

this is recent but in design, i read that companies can now own branding colors and themes.

After reading this, a fun exercise is to imagine you’ve stumbled onto RN, Restaurant News, and found a comment saying,

> Does society accept this behavior outside of the restaurant world? Imagine Google claiming copyright on a website made during an employee’s spare time.

Food is ineligible for copyright, in any event.

This is the default for employed persons in Canada, to some extent: anything you publish could be considered the property of your employer.

In the U.S. I believe this is typically done by agreement, and most companies include it in employment contracts, that I've seen.

The special thing here is how long Google has waited before springing this behaviour on their employees, Google seems to be scheduling all the betrayal into one year, maybe so they don't have to address all of it properly.

> The special thing here is how long Google has waited before springing this behaviour on their employees

Huh? This has been a company policy of theirs for a long time. OP’s post is not about recent actions.

For intellectual property yes. If you invent a new hybrid carrot, your seed maker employer would probably claim that.

Physical property is very different. Your employer cannot claim your carrot or tomato crop in your home garden.

Ultimately, you’re better off with terms like this if you’re working with a big company. If you have permission to do a side project, your are without risk. If you don’t, or your employer doesn’t have a clear policy, there is always the risk that they’ll come out of the woodwork and claim some piece of the action.

> Imagine that a Michelin restaurant would claim copyright on the dishes cooked by the chef in his spare time.

Recipes are not copyrightable in the US. [1] Otherwise, you might see exactly this.

[1] https://www.copyright.gov/help/faq/faq-protect.html

Counterpoint: I open sourced a lot of stuff while I was at Google. There is some friction in the open source releasing and IARC policies (one of my projects got denied), but generally the open source teams at Google want you to do good work. And having clear documentation of ownership is actually helpful; there's a lot of dodgy stuff out there where you're not sure who actually has the rights.

Contrast to Apple, where, aside from a few high profile open source projects that help drive their business (Webkit, Swift, llvm), open source contribution is quite discouraged. How many fun Apple side projects do you see on Github?

I really enjoy the freedom now of just being able to click "create repo" whenever I feel like it, and am sad about the corporatization of the world economy, but I think Google is doing about as well as you can expect here.

You are also famous and had a big OSS presence before joining Google, you worked on Google blessed OSS software while employed there. You are in no way typical of the bullshit other folks have to go through.

The Twitter OP also had his random OSS project approved in IARC and he wasn't famous. He also even says the workflow today is much more permissive than it was when he joined (aka, it's gotten better)

Then again, twitter OP also is attempting to apply boolean logic to legal documents as if that whole "BUT TECHNICALLY" bullshit actually flies in court. He had a bad experience on 1 of 2 projects, decided to contribute to a 3rd knowingly violating policies (legal liability much?), got chewed out for it (but not fired or "retaliated against"), and is now ranting about that experience from many years ago on twitter.

I had two projects go through IARC. One was approved (after a month or two wait IIRC) explicitly because Google wants nothing to do with console hacking projects, emulators, etc. The other was a completely normal OSS project that ships in Ubuntu these days, and it was denied with no explanation or recourse.

It's gotten better, but that doesn't negate my experience. I'm sharing it now, and didn't in the past, because if Google really made a mistake in their Irish contracts in favor of their employees, I didn't want to jinx it for other people. I assume the contract has changed enough by now that it doesn't matter. I also hold no grudge with Google, I left on excellent terms and otherwise enjoyed my experience there - but this IP ownership BS was one of the things that tipped the scale towards moving on to other things in my life.

I was retaliated against, by being explicitly forbidden from ever actually using the relevant corporate processes that other employees enjoyed. I was lucky my contract turned out to be in my favor, or else I might have just left the company at that point.

As for the Boolean logic stuff, you don't need to know what Boolean logic is to be able to read an "or" in a contract. I simply used Boolean logic to explain the subtle difference between my Irish contract and California law. No Irish judge is going to look at my contract and say "well, actually, this is CLEARLY intended to be like California law so that applies here now". The contract, as written, gave me the right to my own work as long as I didn't use company property or do it as a direct result of my work at the company. Just because I explained it in CS terms doesn't mean I'm riding on some obscure technicality.

I personally think this is just another step in a series of many reminding us that Google has become just another US corporation. And a way those grow is by finding 'efficiencies','doing more with less' and leveraging their size. It is an end of an era.

Then again, Jimmy Johns was always pretty bad for the workers and attempted to have kids working there signing non-competes.

Maybe we should be happy it took google so long.

edit: 2 more paragraphs

> Google has become just another US corporation

There are many other U.S. corporations who manage to do business without betraying their employees like this.

> Maybe we should be happy it took google so long.

If you read the thread you'll note that this policy has been around for a long time (at least the ~7 years I've been with Google). The author also notes that, in terms of open source, things have become dramatically _more_ permissive over time.

Longer than me too and I've been there since the mid aughts.

> "Mid-aughts" refers to the first decade of a century. > https://hinative.com/en-US/questions/1300361

In case anyone else is unfamiliar with this term.

That's exactly it, isn't it? Thanks to such restrictive contracts, you need Google's permission.

I do, yes, and that Google grants that permission relatively (to some others companies) freely is a small part of why I work there. I could quit and work on whatever I want, but eventually I'd need to worry about how to pay my mortgage. I could also go work for a smaller company without such a clause in their contract, but part of what I like about my job is the resources available to tackle problems, and I'd likely lose some of that.

Employment often imposes lots of restrictions on the actions we can take. I'm fortunate enough to have some choice in the set of restrictions I have to live with, so for me this particular restriction is just part of the deal.

> Thanks to such restrictive contracts, you need Google's permission.

No you don't. You could roll the dice on a legal battle, relying on your employment contract's exact terms in combination with federal & state laws. Like you have to do most everywhere else.

The reason to go through things like IARC is so that you can avoid all of that. It's Google up-front waiving a legal pursuit on the topic, saying "yes all parties agree this is fine."

When was Google ever anything but "just another US corporation"?

When it was still two guys in a garage?

True - that's when they were an all-American startup, a small group of smart people chasing the American dream.

What's remarkable is that the transition to "just another US corporation" (implying that they value profit over their employees or customers) took so long, that they were able to maintain that startup "communal" culture and innovative mentality.

It's also what makes their current predicament more tragic, the collective disillusionment of their core ideals which is what made them exceptional and respected in the first place.

> Google has become just another US corporation

They’ve always been that to me. We should all try to look past hype and focus on the reality, not just the perception of the moment.

Does Google handle scale better than the vast majority of other companies? Yes.

Did Google build an industry leading search engine? Yes.

Did Google steal the patented idea[0] that ended up giving them essentially f!?k you money that has enabled a lot of both good and bad behavior since? Yes.

Has Google acquired[1] most of the successful products they’ve had since? Yes.

—

[0] here’s one quick source: https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2004-aug-10-fi-googl... but definitely dig into the Overture vs Google lawsuit for a very eye opening story if interested. There’s a ton of shocking details in that case which had long lasting impacts for all companies involved.

[1] Android, YouTube, DoubleClick, Google Docs (Upstartle), Google Maps (Where2/Keyhole/Waze/others), Google Voice (GrandCentral), Groups (Dejavue), Photos (Picasa), WebP/WebM encoder formats (On2), the list goes on and on

I am never sure why people dismiss hype. Hype is a perception and perception, for better or worse, is reality. My boss thinks I am a bum. Do you think it will be easier to change his mind or change jobs?

As to why? Google had a good story. People like good stories.

If hype wasn't effective, we wouldn't have marketing.

Let's be honest, good marketing works. For example, there's plenty of cargo culting on HN which is all about hype and following the pack.

We're humans. Hype, marketing and propaganda works.

Exactly as Steve Blank mentioned 10 years ago (and 3 days shy to boot). The Elves are Leaving Middle Earth - The sodas are no longer free :

https://steveblank.com/2009/12/21/the-elves-leave-middle-ear...

Oh, please. It's standard industry practice for companies to claim ownership of everything a software engineer comes up with, even "on their own time". The problem is it's extremely difficult to say, figure out when someone might have invented some super clever idea which can be pantented "on their own time". This was true when I worked for MIT, VA Linux, IBM, and Google. At VA Linux it was the VC's which insisted on that clause in the employee's contracts. So anyone who think this is some evidence of Google being, or becoming, evil is either seriously misinformed, or just engaging in unthinking hate of Google, or both.

In fact, Google has one of the most permissive IP policies that I've seen at any company except for VA Linux Systems. The default is that the vast majority of work done by an employee can be released under an open source license. Sure, there's a process that you have to go through, and unless what you want to do intersects with work that you are doing for your team that isn't intended to be released publically, or competes with a critical company initiative, the default answer is that it will be allowed to be released.

This is not true for many, if not most companies, and as a responsible open source maintainer, I make sure that people understand they have permission from their company before I accept their open source contributions. Otherwise, I would be putting them, and the project, at risk. (Note that because of this, there are many employees which are not allowed to participate in open source development, because their employers will not give them permission to release code written by an employee under an open source license, whether written "on their own time" or not.)

At Google, once you get this (mostly pro forma) permission, you can work on open source projects on your own time, or on 20% time, using company laptops, or using GCE resources, etc. When I was hired at Google, my manager and I cut a deal such that I could work on Linux Kernel and community projects for 50% of my time, instead of the normal 20%. Sure, the overlap between what was good for Google and what was good for ext4/Linux was pretty broad, but Google also paid for me to travel to various conferences in Asia, Australia, Europe, etc.

Also unique to Google is there is a process by which you can get permission for you to out-and-out own the work done on your own time, as opposed to Google owning it and releasing it under an open source license. If you take that option then it really has to be done on your own time, and must not use any company resources, meaning not on a company laptop, or on a company network, etc. This is rare, and I'm not aware of many other companies that give employees that option.

That's very US industry centered practice. As such, it spread worldwide.

In France at least, negotiation is always open in your employment contract for specific permissions for personal work and open source contributions. I always mentionned that in interviews that went far enough, it also works as a good test.

I thought California had explicit laws about employee rights in this matter?

> The problem is it's extremely difficult to say, figure out when someone might have invented some super clever idea which can be pantented "on their own time".

That depends. If the employee's project is in an area that is completely different from what Google is doing, then it should be clear that there is no conflict. At least the wording in the contract should reflect that possibility.

If that is the case, Google has a process for explicitly relinquishing their claim on copyright to the creator.

The intent of this policy is to make it clear that creators have to go through that process if they want to use something they fabricated as a side project independently.

That seems backwards. If you think something I have is yours, it's up to you to prove it.

That's the purpose of the blanket ownership claim.

I tried going through that process, and they rejected one of my projects (with no followup or explanation, and without replying to my questions). That's the story I told in the OP Twitter thread. That's when I realized the process was broken.

That's highly unusual. I believe you, but it's definitely a weird breakdown in the process.

It'd have been easier, given you were working on it before you joined the company, to claim it on the carve-out document that described the blanket copyright policy. That's what I did for my projects and it was never contested.

(And to be clear, I find the experience you had completely unacceptable. If I'd had the experience you had when I was working there, it would have made me significantly reevaluate whether I wanted to keep working there).

There are many things that are "standard industry practice" that will be illegal some day, and using some other company as a defense for anything is supremely lazy.

> Oh, please. It's standard industry practice for companies to claim ownership of everything a software engineer comes up with, even "on their own time". ... So anyone who think this is some evidence of Google being, or becoming, evil is either seriously misinformed, or just engaging in unthinking hate of Google, or both.

The fact that every other US company is as evil does not make Google any better. The practice is evil, thus Google is evil.

The US got some economic leeway from California and a few other states banishing that exact practice. If they start to backtrack on that, you can expect the entire country to suffer on a couple of decades.

Has Google or any other company actually used this for "evil" though? It sounds like it's just a necessary part of doing business in the US. Don't hate the player. Hate the game. I'm not a lawyer, but I'm sure rules like these make it easier to sue someone if they steal your source code like with Levandowski.

At their size, Google get to dictate the rules of the game. And it's very convenient for them if employees can't have portfolios that make them easier to poach, and can't start side businesses and so on.

Don't expect the public to support IP protection if their only experience is having it used against them.

> Has Google or any other company actually used this for "evil" though?

From the original Twitter thread:

> usbmuxd was rejected without an explanation. My follow-up email asking for clarification was ignored.

> I ended up having to hand over maintainership of usbmuxd.

Different people have different thresholds for evil, but I consider that to be at least unethical. OP was working on usbmuxd before they joined Google. If Google wanted ownership, that should have been discussed during the hiring process. To hire someone, require them to submit a 'request' to retain ownership, and then pull the rug out from under their feet -- I think that's unethical, even if usbmuxd was a conflict of interest.

But of course, OP wasn't working on anything that would make usbmuxd a conflict of interest. Google's policy was, "because someone somewhere in our company is working on something similar, we own it." I think that's also an unethical overreach. If I'm hired to work on A, I don't think I should need to care that someone else at the company is working on B. My conflicts of interest and related software should be determined based on the parts of the software I'm involved in.

I would posit that this stuff isn't a theoretical concern, that OP demonstrated its an unethical policy that is actively being used for unethical reasons.

I mean. You can just always ignore what lawyers say, and just work on open source projects under a pseudonym while you're employed there, which is what the OP did anyways. The worst thing that happened to the OP is that he pissed off some lawyers, and got into an argument with a guy. Also, Google can't own any of your code you did before you're employed there, just any new code from when you're employed by them.

> The worst thing that happened to the OP is that he pissed off some lawyers, and got into an argument with a guy

The worst thing that happened to OP was that he lost control of his project.

> I ended up having to hand over maintainership of usbmuxd.

----

> You can just always ignore what lawyers say, and just work on open source projects under a pseudonym while you're employed there

I am not a lawyer, but this seems like very bad advice. Even ignoring the potential legal risks, many Open Source maintainers like to be able to talk openly about their projects using their real names, especially at conferences, to friends, and to future potential employers.

Even ignoring that, some side projects aren't Open Source. I'm working on commercial, proprietary software outside of work. My company knows it. Even if I wanted to keep it a secret from them, there's no real good way I could do so -- at a certain point, most commercial software gets linked to real people. You're taking on a lot of extra risk that could potentially turn into a nightmare during a discovery process later.

> I am not a lawyer, but this seems like very bad advice.

That's kind of my point. Millions of people have been employed by companies with similar policies, and undoubtably many of them chose to ignore the "correct" legal moves because it's just easier. If Google really wanted to screw people over, they could, but that doesn't seem to be happening.

> If Google really wanted to screw people over, they could, but that doesn't seem to be happening.

But again

> I ended up having to hand over maintainership of usbmuxd.

What's your personal criteria for getting screwed over? From my perspective, it already happened with OP.

I mean like take ownership of a project or start up based on a technicality. Taking someone's app money would be another one. I don't think that making someone else maintain your project is unreasonable, especially if that someone can be a mysterious anon that comes in at the right time.

The "maintainerr" is the "owner" in this context.

I actually didn't piss off the lawyers; the lawyer working under cdibona was a nice guy, and his contributions to the email thread reasonable. cdibona alone flamed me, and then personally banned me from the process.

I hear he's not in charge of that department any more. Maybe that's why the policy is less onerous now.

I see. I appreciate the clarification!

In the original Twitter thread, Google stole ownership of a pre-existing side project when the maintainer filed for approval. That's evil. It may not have been a personal evil, but bureaucratic evil is very real.

Do you have the text of where he says this? It sounds like it's just the work that you do while you're employed there. Even then, it seems like it's just a formality that they don't really bother enforcing.

Why is it a necessary part of doing business in the US? What is different about the US compared to countries where this practice is unheard of?

Right, every company in an entire country is evil. You don't sound horribly biased at all

> It's standard industry practice for companies to claim ownership of everything a software engineer comes up with, even "on their own time"

I've seen this a lot. I've also seen a lot of people saying that it's fair to use github commits as a means of selecting software engineers to employ. What I've not seen is how these two are supposed to co-exist.

I'm a googler, I've got side projects, most of them are open-source.

While I'd prefer not to think about all this and just code, I appreciate that there is an existing policy instead of a bad surprise in a few years.

The current policy, which is 100% public (https://opensource.google/docs/iarc/), is basically "let's assume that we own everything except what we don't, and let's figure things out before it's too late".

If you contribute to an existing open-source project on github, this is basically a non-issue and the answer to who owns the copyright has practically no effect. There are pre-approved licenses and a few banned licenses (agpl, wtfpl, public domain, etc), as well as pre-approved CLAs with major entities (Python, Mozilla, etc).

I think this matters in two cases:

1/ you want to start a new open-source project, you don't want google to have copyright because you think that a good open-source license will not protect you/your work from being stolen (!).

2/ you want to start a side project and maybe one day you'll turn that into a business, and you don't want to be Pied Piper vs Hooli.

Also a googler.

> because you think that a good open-source license will not protect you/your work from being stolen (!).

My reason for wanting to keep copyright is that I want to be allowed to work on my code under the same name after I leave the company. I'd happily trade away that option if I were being paid to work on it, but if it's my hobby, and if (in my view, if not IARC's) it isn't related to my work or Google's business, I won't.

I agree, but I think it's (mostly) not an issue. IIRC we're asked to use our corp email for contributions, unless we already have contributions under your own name/email address on the project.

I read this as:

* if you interacted with people on mailing list with your personal email address, it's OK to use your personal email address in the patches.

* if you are the maintainer of a project, use your own address (unless this is a google project, of course).

edit: don't get me wrong though, I don't like this clause, I just think it only matters in rare cases.

There's some open source projects Google won't let me contribute to because they don't like the project's CLA.

Is there a public list of these and do these projects know?

Because it's standard industry practice, that's OK then ? Argumentum ad populum.

You struck a good deal because of your ext4 maintainership and unique resume ? That's survivorship bias.

There's old, sarcastic, saying in my language for that: we should all eat shit, after all billions of flies can't be wrong!

French?

Polish

are you google pr? because this post is full of misinformation. shopify, microsoft, and a myriad of other tech companies ive worked for have no such clause. google's policy in this regard is terrible. im upset about it because its a pretty basic and valuable thing to be able to participate in your own activities, code or otherwise.

disclaimer: this post reflects my own personal views and not those of my employer.

He's not exactly Google PR, he's a high-ranking Linux maintainer. But, as OP responded in a sibling comment, it's in Google's interest to make him able to keep doing that work - that's essentially why they hired him. He's okay with Google owning the copyright to the OSS he works on, as long as it gets contributed, and that's aligned with Google's interests. He's also been at Google for almost a decade, and if Google is in any way competent, he has no incentive to be looking for other jobs (and reading their employment agreements).

I agree with you that in fact most other tech companies make it pretty easy to own the copyright on work you do on your own time.

It's common for large corporations, but I've been able to negotiate it being removed in all cases but one (it was an acquihire by large corpo and I quit over that after golden handcuffs expired).

Don't accept it as standard or it will really become it.

> Oh, please. It's standard industry practice for companies to claim ownership of everything a software engineer comes up with, even "on their own time".

Is your argument really "it's no big deal cause everyone's doing it"?

He said it a bit different "it's no big deal not only because everyone else is doing it but also because the referred company is one that does it the less."

The added fluff at the end doesn't legitimize his stance for me. This seems to be a common belief in the US: "that because this is the way it is, this is the way it should be".

I can't wait for US citizens to fight back and get some real labor and pro consumer laws in place. It would only take a cursory look at what Europeans and Canadians have to realize that the US is setup for corporations to thrive, not people.

> This is rare, and I'm not aware of many other companies that give employees that option.

I’ve never worked for a tech company who doesn’t allow that and my list of former employers includes many household names that virtually anyone would immediately recognize.

Others have already commented on how this isn't "standard" in places outside the US, so I'll focus on something else.

Ted, you're a Big Deal. You maintain ext4, you're a major kernel contributor. Of course Google is going to keep you happy, give you plenty of time to work on FOSS, and provide you with resources for it. They are paying you to work on FOSS to a large extent. The deal is they give you all this time and resources, and you slap a Google copyright on it and don't care because it's all GPLed anyway, and since you're working on this stuff at work anyway, you throw everything into the same bucket and Google owns whatever commits you make at home too.

This is entirely different from the average Google SWE/SRE, who may have a number of personal projects, and may contribute to random things, but nothing Google cares about much. Google doesn't give a damn if I stop contributing to FOSS. As an SRE, none of my work product at Google had anything to do with FOSS directly (except, like, one 20% project where I ported Linux to some vendor hardware). Google doesn't care if they force me to stop maintaining usbmuxd, which they effectively did by rejecting my IARC application (without answering my questions after it; e.g. they could've proposed going through releasing and Google copyright from then on, but they also didn't do that).

For someone like me, going through all those processes, especially in the form they existed in back when I worked there >5 years ago, was all red tape for zero benefit. Google wasn't sponsoring any of my work. Google doesn't care if I have a commit in ALSA to fix 5.1 audio on a specific Acer laptop. Google doesn't care that I made FireWire not blow up on JMicron controllers on systems with an enabled IOMMU. Google doesn't care that Pulseaudio network discovery now works properly with link-local addresses. Google wasn't paying me to do any of those things. They are just things I did in my own time, as a FOSS user, not as a Google employee. And so, it is not reasonable for Google to own that work, that I do on my own time, that has nothing to do with my job, and to then require me to go through getting permission, and to then slap a Google copyright on all my code. Copyright assignment isn't free. I had to relicense a project from GPL to LGPL recently. It was a simple matter of asking the other 2 one-off contributors and changing the license. It would not have been a simple matter if Google had owned part of the code, which they would've had they not messed up my employment contract in my favor.

Yes, other companies are worse (Apple). That doesn't mean Google gets a pass for being less-bad. It's still broken.

marcan_42, I will have been at Google for 10 years in January, and even back then the Open Source policies were part of the Noogler training, and the fact that Google would own everything you did, even on your own time, was clearly in the stated in the employement document, as well as a place for you list everything that you had worked on before you started work at Google and so was your Intellectual Property (IP).

Google's open source policies is now fully public (as of a few years ago), and I can affirm that they haven't changed substantially in the last ten years. It's all here[1], including the statement releasing code as open source under the Google copyright was very clearly documented in the IARC process[2]:

[1] https://opensource.google/docs/

[2] https://opensource.google/docs/iarc/

So I have trouble taking your complaint that "Google didn't tell me that I had an alternative" seriously. Also, from your description, a huge portion of your contributions that you listed were in the Linux and associated projects (such as Pulse Audio). So all of this would have required one, or perhaps two, requests to release OSS patches; once you have done that for one or two contributions, it's no longer necessary to ask permission for subsequent patches to a OSS project. (This is true for all Googlers.) Asking for permission to release those under GPL is trivial, and is granted as a matter of course. Lots of other Googlers have done it, without problem, and most have not complained the OSS releasing process is heavyweight. IARC is more heavyweight, yes, but it's right there in the IARC process documentation that the OSS releasing process is the preferred option, and that it is lightweight.

Before I started working at VA Linux Systems or at IBM, I had taken the class, "Law for an I/T Manager" at the MIT Sloan School. So I was very well aware of IP law issues (patents, copyright, and trade secrets), and how to read contracts, including employment contracts. So none of this took my surprise (either at VA Linux Systems or at IBM, both of which had similar provisions in the employment contract); perhaps you didn't bother to take the time to read the employment contract and perhaps you didn't bother to read the very clear web pages at Google's Open Source Program Office. I can't speak to what you experienced at your Noogler training, so it's unclear whether you weren't paying attention, or it's since been streamlined. But if you found the IARC documentation so you could submitted the IARC request, you should have found rest, and this shouldn't have been a surprise to you.

> most have not complained the OSS releasing process is heavyweight

Citation needed. I have been at Google for 6 years and I have seen many people either 1. quit in frustration at our OSS policy; 2. stop contributing to OSS projects on their free time because of frustration with our policy; 3. just ignore the OSS policy at the risk of getting fired because the precedent is that most people ignore the policy. Most people I talk with do (3), nobody will admit to it publicly though.

I'm right now waiting for an IARC approval for a small HTML+Typescript that took me 6h to build on a weekend and that I want to MIT-license. This has now been pending for 2 weeks. This is completely ridiculous and it means there is just no reasonable way for someone to follow the policy while doing small side projects on the weekend. Going through the releasing process would have taken roughly the same time, except that Google would also probably not be interested in owning that code for multiple reasons.

> I'm right now waiting for an IARC approval for a small HTML+Typescript that took me 6h

Why do you want IARC and not patching approval for that? Unless your intent is to make money from it in the future, there's really no need to engage in the IARC process.

Patching approval is painless, and the easiest process for something that you want to be considered to exist outside of Google (its owned by you in your personal capacity, but google maintains copyright to your while-employed-by-google contributions), and doesn't require IARC or any approval other than a quick self-approval process for the first few commits. Then it requires nothing.

For example, because I don't want people to have to sign a CLA to contribute patches to my weekend side projects? That's incredibly dev hostile.

Unless it's changed recently, projects released under patching (again, not releasing) don't require a signed cla (edit: just checked and they don't). They're not Google owned, Google just maintains ownership of your contributions.

And if you look at the releasing guidelines, they only make sense for code developed in google3 and later released. You can't actually follow the releasing process for code developed on non-google hardware, your only option is to follow the patching or iarc methods, and patching is trivially easy and doesn't require anyone to sign a cla.

It's not that Google didn't tell me I had an alternative (I knew about the patching process), it's that they ignored my email asking for further info entirely. I wanted clarification on what it means to be a maintainer of an open source project, to then join Google, and to be rejected for IARC.

There was no place for me to list prior projects I had worked on before joining Google. I've heard about this from one other person. It must vary depending on where you joined Google, because I never heard about any such process through my contract/onboarding in Ireland. All I had was the IARC and patching documentation. I was told to go through IARC for existing projects.

In fact, most of my OSS contributions are to random projects. I only listed the PA one because it was the one that got me in trouble, and the two kernel ones because you'd be familiar with that area (in fact those two didn't even happen during my employment with Google). My OSS contributions are completely random. It's rare that I contribute to the same project more than once or twice, with a few exceptions, outside of personal projects and a few things I may be more invested in, or stuff so fundamental and large like the kernel where over the years I end up finding reasons to send a patch multiple times (and even then to completely unrelated subsystems).

What ends up happening 99% of the time is that I use some open source software as a user, I find a bug, I fix it and send a patch. Chances are small I'll ever contribute to that project again. I just happen to enjoy making small contributions. Often those contributions involve high effort but small amounts of code - both inside and outside of Google, I'm somewhat notorious for figuring out issues that nobody else can, even if the resulting patch is one line of code. I've fixed a problem in the Golang runtime that was breaking Google prod even after leaving Google; that bug had been open for half a year. I've fixed an Inkscape bug that was open for many years. This is what I do - little things in random projects that may not be much code, but I'm sure are very appreciated by people affected by the bugs.

And so, with this kind of development, the old process of "get an approval for every project" was completely unsustainable. I work in bursts. I'll spend an evening finding and fixing a bug that has eluded the project developers for months, then I'll move on to the next thing. The last thing I need is to have to go through a multi day approval request after that to be able to send the patch. It completely kills any motivation to do this kind of stuff. And so this is how you wind up with Googlers ceasing to contribute to open source when they join Google.

It's absurd for any company to say they're going to attract passionate programmers, and then expect them to just roll over and give up projects that were started before they even joined at the company.

If you're Google, you can get away with this because you just throw so much money at people that they're willing to temporarily put their life on hold for 3-4 years.

But for any other company, people who are genuinely passionate about something are not going to let you dictate their entire involvement or own everything they produce. My current employer doesn't own "everything" that I produce, only projects that would present a clear conflict of interest. I don't have to be secretive, they know what I'm working on outside of my job -- not even just Open Source stuff, but even closed-source projects that I'm looking to monetize.

I would never, ever join a company that didn't (in writing) allow me to retain ownership of my side projects.

That's the tradeoff. You want your programmers to take initiative, stay up to date in the field, stay creative? You want them to be able to propose novel solutions to your problems, and think outside of the box? You have to let them go outside of the box, and do the things outside of work that keep them in that frame of mind.

If your programmers are scared to experiment outside of work, because they have to run a calculus of whether or not an idea is worth putting on hold until they can actually own it -- well then, surprise, they're not going to experiment outside of work, and your software quality will suffer for it.

People like tytso, who are effectively being sponsored by Google to work on their side projects, might be an exception. Most of your programmers will not be an exception.

> I would never, ever join a company that didn't (in writing) allow me to retain ownership of my side projects.

OK that's fine, but doesn't everyone have this choice? Apparently google attracts thousands of top engineers with this clause. Lots of people agree to it, just because you won't doesn't mean it's absurd. Maybe you are absurd for calling google and their ideas absurd.

Companies like Google are an exception; they pay their engineers so ridiculously much that people are willing to ignore the clause under the assumption that they'll work 2-3 years and quit. Google is also broad enough that they can basically hire passion project employees -- people like tytso who are being paid to spend upwards of 50% of their time working on a side project like the Linux kernel.

If you're a startup or a small company, you do not have enough money to do what Google is doing. You'll attract talent, but you won't attract industry veterans or people who have very wide skill sets, because what your company is doing is not interesting or broad enough to hold their entire attention -- and you're demanding their entire attention, both in and out of work. You're also not in a position to offer anyone like tytso their dream job, because you have a minimum viable product to build with specific requirements. So the industry talent you do have will leave quickly, because in order to do interesting things they'll have to.

I regularly see articles about how to hire good people and keep them, and a lot of them waste time talking about stuff like snacks in the office, or the company culture, or whatever. Very few of them acknowledge that good programmers are good because they like programming, and if you put them in an environment where they can't program without your permission, they'll leave because regardless of how many free sodas you're giving them, they'll still feel smothered. Similarly, the employees that stay will progressively have a harder and harder time keeping up with the industry, because there's no reason at all to explore new technologies when you can't do anything with them.

Take whatever position on the ethics you want, it's absurd to assume that you're going to hire someone who's genuinely passionate, and keep that person around for 10 (or even just 5) years if your company has policies like this. You have to give those people the ability to breathe, or they'll go somewhere else where they feel less strangled.

People look at Google and say, "it's fine, because it works for them." 99% of companies in the world aren't Google, and will not be able to pull this off without suppressing their hire quality and retention.

> People look at Google and say, "it's fine, because it works for them." 99% of companies in the world aren't Google, and will not be able to pull this off without suppressing their hire quality and retention.

Do they really? Who cares? If some startup adopts the policies of one of the largest most successful companies in the world, then that is stupid and on them, they deserve to fail. At this point it doesn't even have anything to do with Google.

You said you won't apply to Google because of their policy, I said fine they don't need you they have plenty of qualified applicants. Now you're saying the problem is all these copycats. OK, whatever. Let them do what they want, and let people sign agreements they want. You just keep saying that it's absurd, but that doesn't make it so. That is entirely your opinion and the fact that thousands of engineers CHOOSE to work there is supporting that it's not absurd. If this is all about Google and you don't care and would never work there then why do you care so much about the people that do? Are you concerned they're being oppressed in some way? Have they been mislead? Isn't it possible they just disagree with you?

I never said anything about trying this policy out at your local startup or anything about what's best for you as a programmer in general. No kidding people like freedom? People lash out at Google and then turn it into something completely different halfway through the conversation.

I think your reaction here is similar to how people reacted to the headline that a woman sued her 5 year old nephew for accidentally breaking her arm. She was actually suing the parent's home owners insurance policy because the policy is supposed to cover these kinds of accidents. The insurance company didn't want to pay out though, so they spun the story to a news broadcaster in an effort to shame her into dropping the claim.

Most cases where an employer claims ownership of something an engineer did on their own time, it's because the engineer decided to create a competing product and used information or other ip they only had access to as an employee. The guy trying to sell his competing product doesn't want to acknowledge that they've violated a non-compete or NDA they signed, so they publicly claim their employer is just being a bunch of greedy bastards. When you dig into known cases of employers claiming ownership of an employees outside work there are cases where they worked on it before they joined, but those are outliers, and having initial work from before joining doesn't mean that later work hasn't infringed on the employers existing IP.

This topic is often complicated, but the realistic answer is that you should always tell your employer that you've started working on something and have it acknowledged as yours way before any valuable IP is created. Not doing so isn't just irresponsible, it's a known business pattern that results in failure. You should ideally tell them before you've even answered the question of how you intend to do it. Nobody is going to steal a vague idea, so this just eliminates the possible argument later. A lack of ability to trust is a strong indicator of eventual failure of the project anyway, so there simply isn't a reason to avoid doing it.

The cases that make it to court are often the ones where the employee was in the wrong, but cases that make it to court aren't the only thing to judge these policies by. If the policies cause a chilling effect where people who join give up on contributing to outside projects (as the OP twitter thread and multiple others from the author talk about), then it's valid to criticize the policy for that. The cases that make it to court are more likely to have the employee be in the wrong because they're selected from the subgroup of cases where the employee went against the policy instead of quitting outside contributions.

This isn't a bad argument, but it doesn't match up with the experience that OP had in the Twitter thread.

I don't see the point in arguing about what most theoretical cases are when we can instead talk about the actual case that actually happened here. It's difficult to argue that OP stole anything, and they weren't competing with Google, and OP is saying that they didn't use company resources to build anything.

Unless your claim is that OP actually did something wrong, the rest of it a little too theoretical for me.

I've written this elsewhere, but if obvious abuses were all that companies cared about, the terms wouldn't be written so broadly as to cover everything. A contract is not the place to put an egregious term and then say, "don't worry, we won't enforce it." Treat contracts like they will be enforced.

In particular, we've seen this pattern with arbitration agreements. How many women signed Google's arbitration agreements when they joined under the (false) assumption that, "of course for something serious like sexual abuse, Google wouldn't enforce that"?

> you should always tell your employer that you've started working on something and have it acknowledged as yours way before any valuable IP is created

I do heavily agree with you on this.

Don't do what OP did and just ignore the terms, be up front about what you're doing. It just removes doubt. And don't be afraid to walk away from a company if they won't negotiate on this kind of stuff. You want to be in a trusting relationship with your employer.

I get your point, and if the parent's argument was "but the situation is not that they do it on their own time, but that they violate NDAs etc." then it'd be a solid argument. But the parent argues that it's completely normal for a company to claim ownership on 100% of employee's life and intellectual output, regardless of NDAs and IPs, and that Google has to be praised for permitting you to keep your intellectual output to yourself, if you ask extra nice.

> so there simply isn't a reason to avoid doing it.

Well, one of the reasons would be what I do outside of work is not my employer's effing business. Of course, if I am taking stuff from work, it makes sense to tell my employer - e.g., if I use company's car to move my furniture, I'd better clear it with my boss, same goes for IP. But if I use my own car to move my own furniture, why would I need to tell my boss about it, even if I use the company car when they are paying me? I mean, I might get a paper just to cover my ass, but that's rather a testament to the state of litigiousness and ridiculousness of our society, not a proper way to do things.

> It's absurd for any company to say they're going to attract passionate programmers, and then expect them to just roll over and give up projects that were started before they even joined at the company.

What I find more absurd are companies that want to hire employees that are passionate and work on side projects but also require employees to sign extremely broad “we own your IP” contracts. It’s like they are saying, “We want to hire the most passionate! But we also want to own all the work they do outside of work. Free labor!”

It seems like the industry as a whole is moving towards standardizing around such a double requirement in hiring, and I do not like that trend.

The industry isn't moving towards this. The IP agreements I signed at start-ups in 1994, 1998, 1999, and so on all had functionally identical terms. And more, like the duty to in good faith pursue patents whenever merited and assist IP attorneys with the creation of filings and sign over patent rights for nominal sums. [Edit formatting and typos.]

I wasn’t referring to the IP clauses when I said moving towards. I meant it in the context of employers glorifying passion and moving the baseline job requirements towards having projects outside of work.

First time I heard that companies hire employees for free.

This is not necessarily "give up". You still own the code that was written before you joined the company. If it is an open source project, your code contributions after you start work will still be open source. They will just be owned by the company, so the resulting code will have some code owned by you, and some code owned by the company. If this is a healthy open source project (such as, say, e2fsprogs), it already has some code owned by Red Hat, some code owned by SuSE, some code by IBM, etc. So the fact that there will be some code written by you, but actually owned by Google, is (everyone repeat after me) No Big Deal.

Now, it's different if your "side project" is under a proprietary license, and you hope to make $$$ some day. In that case, companies like IBM, Google, VA Linux Systems, which have a "all your IP belong to us" will be problematic for you. You can choose not to work for such a company, or you can choose to try to negotiate with the company.

But for a side project which is an open source project, in general there won't be a problem. Now, if said open source project directly competes with a proprietary product sold by that company --- you had better disclose it up front during the hiring negotiations, and have a negotiation about how it should be handled. The fact of the matter is, the company doesn't have a right to your services, and you don't have a right to a job at that company. You negotiate it, just like you negotiate cash salary and equity compensation. And if you can't come to a negotiated outcome that both sides are happy with, neither side is evil; they just couldn't come to an agreement.

> This is not necessarily "give up".

"Giving up" is an ambiguous term here and I should have tried to be more specific. But I wasn't just referring to ownership. If I'm working on a project, and joining Google means I need to stop working on it for 3-4 years, then I've effectively given up that project, in the sense that it's no longer going to be maintained or stay relevant.

I'm unlikely to go back to a 3-4 year old project and pick it up again later. Most of those projects are dead.

> So the fact that there will be some code written by you, but actually owned by Google, is (everyone repeat after me) No Big Deal.

Sure, unless your company is Oracle and they decide X years later to say, "actually we own the code and we didn't authorize it to be Open Sourced, and that means the entire project is infringing."

People are so ready to say that terms like this are no big deal. If it really doesn't matter who owns the code that gets contributed to an Open Source project, then why is it important that Google own it? If Google isn't going to exploit that code in any way, then they shouldn't have a problem with their employees retaining ownership, right?

> Now, it's different if your "side project" is under a proprietary license

I think it's unrealistic and unreasonable to assume that every time an employee enriches themselves outside of work, they'll be doing it in relation to an Open Source project.

It's also ignores the fact that a nontrivial portion of Silicon Valley was built on top of people who didn't accept those terms. We can say this stuff is standard and it all comes down to individual choice, but we have pretty decent data that universally getting rid of noncompetes was good for the software industry. We have reasonably decent data that allowing employees to work on commercial side projects outside of work would similarly be good for the industry.

Labor laws just haven't caught up yet to that point.

> Neither side is evil; they just couldn't come to an agreement.

I do think that these policies are unethical, that they amount to a kind of attempted takeover of employee autonomy on a level that a business owner shouldn't even be trying to restrict.

However, that wasn't the argument I was making when I said this was absurd. I was just making the observation that most businesses don't have as much money as Google to throw at people or to offer them dream jobs. So most businesses who attempt this are giving up any chance of hiring the best developers, because on average the best developers won't tolerate those terms unless they come attached to Google money and a dream job.

Obviously, direct competition or conflicts of interest are another story, but nobody is debating them. It's a mistake to start from, "direct conflicts of interest should be avoided", and then immediately extrapolate from there to "a business should own everything that comes out of an employee, anywhere."

> "Giving up" is an ambiguous term here and I should have tried to be more specific. But I wasn't just referring to ownership. If I'm working on a project, and joining Google means I need to stop working on it for 3-4 years, then I've effectively given up that project, in the sense that it's no longer going to be maintained or stay relevant.

And what I'm saying is that for an open source project, in general that doesn't happen. And if you're not sure, you negotiate that up front. I did that when I started work for IBM, for example. And it was more than just copyright issues; it included stuff like, "look, I'm one of the chairs of the ipsec working group, and I'd like you to pay for me to travel to IETF meetings so I can finish out my commitment to IETF, even though that doesn't have that much to do with the IBM Linux Technology Center". Everything is negotiable; they might say no, but you'll never know until you ask.

More generally, I'm having trouble thinking of situations where you (a) can't take a side project and release it as open source, and (b) you're wanting to keep it proprietary except for "wanting to earn $$$ on a side project" while also drawing from a big company.

> Sure, unless your company is Oracle and they decide X years later to say, "actually we own the code and we didn't authorize it to be Open Sourced, and that means the entire project is infringing."

Nope, it doesn't work that way. Once code is released under an open source license, that can't do a "I take it back!" thing. So long as there is an explicit open source releasing policy, and you followed it, then you are an authorized agent of the company when you released changes (including git commits) whose copyright is owned by the company. I can use fancy legal terms like "latches" and "equitable defenses", but the principle is quite simple: "No backsies."

Oracle can say that no new code will be released for Open Solaris, but they can't change their mind on the Open Solaris code already released under an open source license. Again, programmers really should understand basic IP law. It's not that complicated....

> It's also ignores the fact that a nontrivial portion of Silicon Valley was built on top of people who didn't accept those terms.

Um, if it's in an employment contract, and you signed it without reading it --- sorry, but I have very little sympathy for you. If you signed it, you agreed to it.

> if it's in an employment contract, and you signed it without reading it --- sorry, but I have zero sympathy for you.

Arguing that employees should read their contracts, and arguing that the terms in those contracts aren't problematic, are two entirely separate things.

I agree with you on the first point, I disagree with you on the second.

> So long as there is an explicit open source releasing policy, and you followed it, then you are an authorized agent of the company when you release changes

This is the key part. If Oracle has a policy like Google's, and if Oracle decides to let you release that code, and if you follow the process correctly, then you're fine. In practice, this assumes a great deal. You're arguing that as long as a company

a) has an official Open Source release policy, and

b) agrees to let you use that policy,

then there's no problem. And, sure. As long as Oracle explicitly gives you permission to contribute code to Open Source projects, nothing bad will or can happen[0]. But that's a very different thing than arguing that it's fine for employers to retain complete control over

a) what that policy is, and

b) what projects are allowed under it.

It's like claiming that if no abuse happens, there's no problem. It's true, but doesn't mean anything. The issue is that under the terms Google proposes, there is nothing preventing abuse. You're entirely at Google's mercy over whether or not you can contribute to any project, proprietary or Open Source.

The issue is that when you sign those terms, you no longer have a guarantee that you can contribute to anything. And if you operate outside of whatever policy exists, you are opening yourself up to exactly the kind of abuse I describe. That's what I was trying to argue with Oracle: not that you'll have future problems if you follow an official policy, but that Open Source licenses are not enough to save you in the absence of an official policy, and that Open Source licenses are not enough to save you if you get rejected from that official policy.

> I'm saying is that for an open source project, in general that doesn't happen.

Except in the case of OP, where they were forced to find a separate maintainer for their project. You're not the only person to suggest here that this never happens, but... it did. You can argue that OP should have negotiated that up front before they took the job. I would tend to agree with you on that.

But outside of OP's own responsibility, is it good for anyone else, anywhere, that they were forced to abandon that project? Not, "what could they have done differently", not "do they bear any responsibility" -- is it good for the software industry as a whole that Google was able to do what it did?

I would argue no. I would argue the entire history of Silicon Valley says that allowing these kinds of terms is counterproductive to maintaining a healthy software industry, and that ideally labor laws in California would treat "we own everything" clauses the same way they treat noncompete agreements.

----

[0]: Except that you won't be able to re-license later, and you won't be able to contribute to projects that force you to assign copyright, and in the case of GPL software you write you'll be bound to the same GPL terms as every other user. But those are admittedly probably minor concerns for most projects.

It is worth re-asking the question though -- if code ownership doesn't matter for Open Source projects, why does Google want it? Why is it important for Google to own code contributions their employees make to Open Source projects?

My argument is that employees are responsible for reading the contract, and if the contract have terms that might be problematic for open source contribution, the employee is responsible for finding out ahead of time what the policy is. (For Google, the policy is publically available[1], so it can be read by people who aren't yet employees.) If the policy is not acceptable to you, then you shouldn't work for that company.

[1] https://opensource.google/docs/

And if the policy changes --- such as for example, when Oracle suddenly changed the rules about Open Solaris, the solution is simple. You quit. Large portions of the core Solaris team left, soon after Oracle changed the rules.

Bryan Cantrill left Oracle, and he's done fine for himself. He's even made talks explaining what happened when Oracle screwed over Open Solaris:

"As you know people, as you learn about things, you realize that these generalizations we have are, virtually to a generalization, false. Well, except for this one, as it turns out. What you think of Oracle, is even truer than you think it is. There has been no entity in human history with less complexity or nuance to it than Oracle. And I gotta say, as someone who has seen that complexity for my entire life, it's very hard to get used to that idea. It's like, 'surely this is more complicated!' but it's like: Wow, this is really simple! This company is very straightforward, in its defense. This company is about one man, his alter-ego, and what he wants to inflict upon humanity -- that's it! ...Ship mediocrity, inflict misery, lie our asses off, screw our customers, and make a whole shitload of money. Yeah... you talk to Oracle, it's like, 'no, we don't fucking make dreams happen -- we make money!' ...You need to think of Larry Ellison the way you think of a lawnmower. You don't anthropomorphize your lawnmower, the lawnmower just mows the lawn, you stick your hand in there and it'll chop it off, the end. You don't think 'oh, the lawnmower hates me' -- lawnmower doesn't give a shit about you, lawnmower can't hate you. Don't anthropomorphize the lawnmower. Don't fall into that trap about Oracle." -- Bryan Cantrill https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-zRN7XLCRhc

It did not use to be standard industry practice.

Now even every bodyshop and IT Contracting outfit has language in their agreements that claim ownership.

It is a claim that they own the information contained in one’s brain

As others have said, this is nowhere near the standard outside of the US. Personally, I consider this "industry standard" pretty gross and touching on some very uncomfortable topics like wage slavery. Your employer should not own your ideas and it should not matter where you got them.

A no-compete clause is the much more reasonable solution a company can use to protect itself from flagrant violations of trust.

> A no-compete clause is the much more reasonable solution a company can use to protect itself from flagrant violations of trust.

Non-competes are illegal in California

>It's standard industry practice for companies to claim ownership of everything a software engineer comes up with

Well, because it's standard industry practice, I guess you're not allowed to complain about it.

Your whole argument is that it's the norm, while this article advocates for changing the norm.

Their argument seems to be that "California law allows us to do it", and "it's protecting us from employees creating competing products".

The problem I see with that is

1) They don't have to do everything they're legally allowed to in a contract as long as they aren't breaking the law.

2) It's disingenuous to spin this as somehow protecting employees. They just want people to make use of their process so that they get to arbitrarily decide whether they own something or not. If employees were really interested in exercising their legal rights, they could ignore the IARC and work on it on their own time anyway, and if Google wanted to, they could try suing the employee to get the copyright transferred. In practice, that makes them look bad, so they have the IARC process instead, which makes it easier for them to pressure employees into assigning things to Google, even if it wouldn't stand up in court.

> It's standard industry practice for companies to claim ownership of everything a software engineer comes up with, even "on their own time"

No, it's standard industry practice to claim ownership of everything a software engineer comes up to that relates to the company's business. It's certainly not standard practice to claim ownership of, like, a young-adult fiction novel you write on weekends.

The unusual thing here is that Google's business and potential business is approximately everything to do with computers.

> Also unique to Google is there is a process by which you can get permission for you to out-and-out own the work done on your own time, as opposed to Google owning it and releasing it under an open source license. If you take that option then it really has to be done on your own time, and must not use any company resources, meaning not on a company laptop, or on a company network, etc. This is rare, and I'm not aware of many other companies that give employees that option.

I think this is perfectly normal. I've never worked somewhere where it isn't true. (Also, isn't this basically required for the common Silicon Valley practice of "working on your side hustle while employed at your FAANG, and then getting investors later" to not be fraught with IP dangers?)

Thank you. "We own everything you do" is absolutely not standard practice, even in the US, and we shouldn't do Google's work for them by pretending it is. The linked Twitter thread says Google "tries to appropriate" everything you do, which is a very different claim.

I've seen "we own everything" asserted exactly once, in a laughably bad "Whartonite seeks code monkey" contract. Meanwhile, "you own unrelated work done on your own time, without company resources" is not at all unique to Google; it's been in every other IP ownership clause I've ever read. Many of them don't even require "a process by which you can get permission". They might require disclosure, or encourage you to talk to Legal if there's an appearance of overlap, but if you write thermostat software at work you can go make Flappy Bird at home without asking anyone for permission.

What's actually common, and what Google does, is claiming ownership of anything touching not only resources but the company's business. In the narrowest cases this is completely understandable: Mongo/10gen doesn't want employees to notice a Mongo pain point at work, then instead of mentioning it go home and build a product they know will have eager customers. And a bit more broadly, companies don't want their staff punching the clock, then going home and building a competitor with the experience they gained at work. But of course, companies have no real incentive to stop at what's reasonable: they'd like to own what you make, or capture all of your creative energy, so they commonly say "you can't make anything in our same industry". Amazon is infamous for attempting to claim "a connection with a cofounder" as a company resource and so claim anything made by ex-Amazon teams. (Which is only infamous because "we own everything" isn't common - if it were then Amazon's policy would look lenient.)

As you say, Google is doing the same thing, it's just that they do everything and they're just limiting ownership to the employee's scope of business. Maybe you work on Gmail, but Google owns Nest, so they can claim your smart home project. It's not a standard level of restriction, it's aggressive and probably unenforceable.

> Oh, please. It's standard industry practice for companies to claim ownership of everything a software engineer comes up with, even "on their own time".

I have not yet worked at a job where this was the case, and I would decline an offer to do so. It is unusual here, but I know of a friend who signed such a contract for a video game studio, but then only for games specifically and not IT in general.

Mostly thanks to unions there are plenty of options not to work for these leeches.

> The problem is it's extremely difficult to say, figure out when someone might have invented some super clever idea which can be pantented "on their own time".

On the other hand it's extremely difficult to say that the innovations I contribute to my employer are conceived exclusively during paid hours.

> So anyone who think this is some evidence of Google being, or becoming, evil is either seriously misinformed, or just engaging in unthinking hate of Google, or both.

Without even addressing the conclusion you can surely see how this reasoning is faulty. If all evil things that were ever considered common practice were excused for only that reason, we'd probably live in a pretty shitty world.

California law gives everyone that second option as I understand it.

You can call it industry standard but it is blatant exploitation of workers and their rights. It is also breaking one of basic human rights, right to work, putting them into situation where they are slaves to the company.

Someone in EU should bring this to the EU court for human rights, I am sure they would win the case and stop this practice, at least for EU.

For my country this is completely unenforcable and every judge would just drop the case.

IT workers should form union. Seriously. We have huge power, a week of strike can bring a company down, or even internet. And based on such contracts, I wouldnt be surprised if joining union is also forbiden in states (can someone at google please check his contract?)

Maybe just a detail for USA workers, a brief explanation how some things work in some EU states, as an alternative to union, much softer one, but it has teeth (as an extreme, it can get CEO to a jail).

I am 8 years (elected, 2 mandates, around 1200 workers) in workers council (Germans might be well aware of this). This is a "political body" which as its basic description, has to work in favor of workers AND company (distinction between union - union will defend the worker even if company goes down - workers council tries to do what is best for company and worker, sometimes annoying but beneficial at most times for both - and there is always a baseball bat that it can transform to a union. The definition can make a lot of decisions hard, but at least it does take the company into account). And as most important, it can break owners decisions that are harmfull to the company.

The company has obligation to get a conformation from the workers council for important decisions, like selling the company. And we can break a deal (the CEO goes to jail case).

The confirmation also needs to be given for any larger lay off of employees. No we wont allow that for short boost of cash to satisfy management bonus conditions (HP).

It can also effect the decisions where it can affect workers contract changes. It can veto them.

Monthly reports about company financials. We are still bound to NDA, but we hava enough informations to decide.

Selling a company. We can veto.

There is hell of a lot more legislation behind this, buf I think it can solve a lot of issues that USA has.

(I have a hell of a lot to say to this, but I dont want to translate hunderds of pages of legaslation for nothing. Please DO ask.)

I'm afraid this doesn't have enough corporatocracy or dystopia, but thank you.

Actually in the NGINX case, the former company claims (or is trying to find proofs, such as timings of git commits) that Nginx has been developed on company's paid time. Even if the sysadmin was "on call" and coding Nginx on the side. I guess the Nginx lesson should be a wake up call for all of us who are developing FLOSS on the side.

This does seem to be an industry standard practice when it comes to employment contracts. However, you are well within your rights to scrub this out before you commit to signing the contract. I've scrubbed this clause out of every contract. My intellectual thoughts that are outside and unrelated to this project are mine and mine alone. No employer in my mind has the right to that.

Pretty much every company I know does this:

> If you take that option then it really has to be done on your own time, and must not use any company resources, meaning not on a company laptop, or on a company network, etc. This is rare, and I'm not aware of many other companies that give employees that option.

It’s actually a California law that the company can’t own what you do on your own time with your own equipment.

Further, I’ve gone through this process with two employers. All I did was disclose what I was doing and they set limitations on MY EMPLOYMENT at their company. So they wouldn’t take the IP, just they may not continue to employ me. The limitation was simply that “I couldn’t willfully help competitors to the company” then they listed a few industries. This was true for two fortune 100 companies I worked for.

> It’s actually a California law that the company can’t own what you do on your own time with your own equipment.

This comes up a lot here and is only half true. California law does not protect IP that is similar to what the company does or may do: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21754139

It's not standard practice and I would never agree to it. It's standard practice to claim ownership of things done at work or for the job itself.

This is a disgusting policy - basically the company OWNS you if you do anything meaningful. Complete defeats the idea of "freedom" and takes away the already pitiful chances of normal people "making it". Ib4 people pretend not having a job is a valid option. This isn't Google specific, but it's one of the few things that genuinely upsets me. Hell, more than the death of net neutrality.

> It's standard industry practice for companies to claim ownership of everything a software engineer comes up with, even "on their own time".

That doesn't make it acceptable. I've never signed a contract with such clause nor will I.

When I was freelancing one of my clients tried to get me to sign a contract with a clause like this. It would have killed my business since I worked on multiple projects at once. In their case it was an oversight in using a form contract and they changed it.

> Oh, please. It's standard industry practice for companies to claim ownership of everything a software engineer comes up with, even "on their own time".

If you make a kid (on your own time, with your own equipment, and not in their office), should it also by their property?

Since pregnancy is part of "making" a baby and the uterus works 24/7, Google actually has a stronger case for ownership of its female employees' children than for their intellectual creations.

>So anyone who think this is some evidence of Google being, or becoming, evil is either seriously misinformed, or just engaging in unthinking hate of Google, or both.

Just because an evil practice was already well adopted does not change that increased adoption of that practice by an entity can reasonably be taken as a sign of that entity's evil quotient increasing.

> Oh, please. It's standard industry practice for companies to claim ownership of everything a software engineer comes up with, even "on their own time".

Bullshit. I've never had to do that in 17 years as a software engineer (in the United States). Don't normalize this crap and make excuses for it.

Not only that, the bit about letting you "out-and-out own the work done on your own time... not [using] any company resources" is standard.

Most ownership clauses allow it, and many of them don't even require permission. They might require notice, or encourage you to check in with legal up front to preempt issues, but they don't require you to get approval for a project totally unrelated to your job. I'm not sure why people are claiming the situation is already so bad there's no point in caring.

This type of commentary only serves to move the progressive goalpost closer towards the conservative (imho also the regressive side) of the debate.

Yes everyone does it. But is that ok? To suggest so, is to suggest there is no better alternative. This thinking ultimate leads to it's predicted outcome, not because of any sort of prescience, but out of the lack of will to use the available light to find a better way out.

I recently joined Google and have a general purpose Apache-licensed Java library which I submitted and was rejected for overlap. This seemed fair since they also have similar projects (e.g. Guava) even though I don't work on them (or even write Java there). I can still contribute to the project and will be able to use that code forever since it is also Apache, I just won't hold copyright and therefore wouldn't be able to relicense it without their permission, but that's not a concern of mine so I've been happily hacking away on it.

I also submitted a new side project, which obtained copyright release quickly (couple days) and without any additional qualifications, which was nice as I could then proceed freely with it.

Overall I'm pretty happy with the process and thought it and the rules around it were fair.

Depends on where you live - it's not normal.

>Oh, please. It's standard industry practice for companies to claim ownership of everything a software engineer comes up with, even "on their own time".

Whatever something is "standard industry practice" and whatever its outrageous and should be stopped and called for what it is, is orthogonal.

"standard industry practice" is a gross cop-out for a lot of really, really vile behavior.

I'm astonished that I came to this thread and the top comment was a lengthy defense of Google. This behavior is absolutely unacceptable. "Standard industry practice" my ass. This is literally the "if your friends all jumped off of a bridge" argument. It's not okay for Google, and it's not okay for everyone else. Many wrongs don't make a right. I shouldn't need your permission to be creative on my own time. Employees do not exist to give their lives in service of your giant capitalist machine. Employers have zero claim to any IP generated in the employee's own time using the employee's own resources - end of story.

This is not standard practice in Seattle. Not unheard of, but not standard.

There are places you can work outside of the Valley.

> Oh, please. It's standard industry practice for companies to claim ownership of everything a software engineer comes up with, even "on their own time".

Not in my big tech company. You have to disclose any side work you do only if it is similar to the work you do. Not if it is similar to anything the company does. And they're not overly broad (so my doing SW doesn't mean I have to report all SW side work).

As someone else said, let's not normalize this crap.

Why do software developers accept this? It's the only profession i've heard of things like this happening. I've never had an employer even think that anything I make or do in my own time is their business, even when i've used materials or equipment from work. The idea that an employer has any rights to anything I do they aren't paying me for is mind boggling.

I have either gotten that clause struck from my contract, ensured it is limited to direct competition or turned down the position. People really not need to take it for granted, we are in a hot hot hot tech market we have options and that affords leverage. Use it.

Im sorry but this is an absolutely terrible argument, no company should be allowed to do this, period.

If anything this shows google continuing to move to "evil" by moving towards an already established terrible practice. It is absolutely absurd its allowed in the first place, and its absurd you take it. I don't mean to be a dick, but your position on this kind of makes you look entitled. No way my employer is ever getting any of my work done on my time, and just because you have allowed this to happen to yourself for so long does not mean it should happen to others, or that is an acceptable business practice.

I think it makes sense that Google wants to control what employees do in the time they pay them for. "Using company laptops" is kinda stretching it (I mean, I could buy a separate laptop just for open-source patches, especially if I'm paid Google salary, but isn't that really a ridiculous pettiness? Marginal cost of it to Google is exactly zero). But claiming you own somebody's free time and everything they do in their free time, just because they pay the person a salary is beyond ridiculous. I can get why people put up with it - those sweet Google salaries again - but it doesn't stop being beyond ridiculous. It's like I'd claim if I hire a lawyer now I get to be a beneficiary of every lawsuit they ever file, or if I buy a book the writer now owes me royalties on every book they write from now on. It just mind-boggling that one has to get some kind of "permission" to own the products of one's own brain and hands because they get salary from Google, and that people expect Google to be praised for letting some people to use their own brain.

At my prior company we explicitly disclaimed copyright interest in employee contributions to a long list of standard open source software which included by reference the entire OIN Linux system definition, specifically to avoid any complication related to employees contributing patches back to the open source tools they used in the course of their work (and accordingly this covered not just work done on their own time, but also contributions made the course of their work). Employees were also invited to nominate additional pieces of software fairly liberally, particularly free software that didn't overlap with the organization's central business.

While promoting permissive approaches like this with other organizations I've encountered employers which seem to have a some confusion about the purposes of different parts of their agreement. E.g. an IP agreement is essentially unrelated to making sure an employee is doing their job-- so a "I don't want them spending a lot of time on that" isn't a valid reason to impinge their rights, after all they would be perfectly able to slack off by staring blankly at the coffee pot regardless of what your IP agreement says.

An IP agreement should be about having a clear boundary on company property, it's not a replacement for effective management. Unless you're an operating system company (which to some extent google is, but very few of the innumerable companies that copy google's practices are), trivial fixes to widely used open source software are not good candidates for company property and are not at all candidates for it if developed on the employee's own time.

I really like that approach - is there any chance to get more information about that list? Like how it was compiled and maintained, maybe even the list itself?

I do software consulting sleeved through various contracting or consulting companies. All of the paperwork I have to sign tries to have a claim to any IP created at the job. I immediately red line this unless there is some sort of reasonableness to it. I don’t mind giving some percentage of IP to a company that kept me busy somewhere for a year and the Resultant IP isn’t the main focus of the engagement. They are right that it probably wouldn’t have happened if they had not given me the opportunity. Otherwise I am not going to relinquish the right rights to code written to solve a problem. Most clauses I’ve seen are in this vein. Nope. DRY.

DRY?

Think he means DYR, do your research.

Dont repeat yourself. IF you have code that solves a problem, dont rewrite it at every gig...

Now thats a philosophy I both agree and disagree with.

Agree: omg do i need to write this form again? Seriously just write a library already!

Disagree: this problem is subtly yet incompatibly different to what I've seen and dealt with before. The library would need x,y,z but their IP demands mean I'd lose rights to my closed-source library or be forced to open source it to keep using it elsewhere.

I agree with you. The only absolute is that there are no absolutes. However what the practical application of DRY ends up being for me is that I have a "bag of tricks" I carry with me as well as my own "library o' repetitious programming tasks" that I look into first. Much of the time I can save a lot of time by reusing old code. I may have a bit of code that is too specific for the original purpose and get tired of the technical debt it causes, and re-write it. So in that case I am repeating myself, but its with the benefit of experience. More of a refactor than repeat.

but that's exactly the case where things become an issue. if you were able to write a library, it would be worth the effort to write it once more from scratch and make sure that the copyright of the previous code is not infringed.

instead however, what happens is that you have a problem that looks similar to a previous problem, so you take the old code and modify it to fit the new problem.

NOW you have the additional problem of having reused code that's owned by employer A, for a project at employer B.

Don’t Repeat Yourself, I presume

i follow a similar approach. i don't generally mind employers owning copyright for work they pay me for, but i am concerned that i might need to solve a problem that i already solved at a previous job and unintentionally recreate it in a way that it looks like a copy of the old solution.

to avoid this, where possible i ask that all code i write is released under a FOSS license giving me explicit permission to reuse it.

It is my understanding that there has never been a case in California where a court has said “OK, your employer owns that open source patch you made at 3am on your own laptop”. Poking around, Applied Materials, Inc. v. Advanced Micro-Fabrication Equipment comes to mind; here is a summary:

https://www.arnoldporter.com/en/perspectives/publications/20...

The only public case I know of where a company has been able to claim the open source software someone made in their own time is the Nginx case which is ongoing right now in Russia. [1] I remember a story about someone in the US (not in California) where they were asked by their employer to stop working on open source Perl code in their own spare time, but there was, as I recall, no litigation there.

As for myself, I am very careful to make it clear, when signing an “inventions” clause, that I will work on MaraDNS in my own personal time while employed. I also go to a lot of effort to date stamp my open source code, and to only use versions of my open source code written before I signed the “inventions” clause for anything work related. Actually, I prefer working as an independent contractor for employers who do not burden me with an “inventions” clause.

[1] The details are different: As I understand it, Igor Sysoev was given permission from his employer to work on nginx while at the job, and the legal stuff didn’t come up for well over a decade after Sysoev left Rambler, and, of course, it’s in Russia, so it’s somewhat different than the “3am commit on one’s own laptop in California” issue.

If that is the case then why is this a law? Why isn't the law more clear to reflect reality? I don't really want a gun pointed at me, regardless of whether I'm about to get shot. The threat and power structure is still there.

Because there's no incentive to change the law precisely because it's never been a problem. Despite the popular narrative, legislators are typically pretty busy (a lot of this is self-inflicted, though). So striking a law that has never been enforced a certain way because it might be enforced that way isn't a very productive use of their limited time, especially when courts have ruled quite the opposite.

Our lack of IP assignment waiver was red-flagged during a VC due-diligence exercise. It became a non-negotiable item, and we got all our employees to sign a waiver. Our waiver has an exclusion list similar to Google's IARC, but unlike Google we have allowed 100% of all exclusions that employees have submitted.

It did seem the VCs were far more worried about a rogue former employee somehow acquiring IP rights over our core IP than stealing unrelated work from our employees. No-one has been able to explain to me how this might happen though; I suspect it's all paranoia.

> rogue former employee somehow acquiring IP rights over our core IP

"Rogue ex-co-founder comes out of the woodwork X years later and claims they own half of your thing" is a horror story in startup land; see Facebook for an example of this. (The Social Network movie is a fictionalized depiction, but the real-world drama was sufficiently troublesome for Facebook that they initially weren't planning on engaging with the movie. Last minute they decided to rent a theater to take the whole company to see it, and Jesse Eisenberg started helping Mark Zuckerberg with his public speaking.)

Heh. I've seen that tried once, as an employee. Not sure what the motivation was, may have been investment-related.

Pretty sure not a single person signed. No harm came to us. Solidarity'll do that.

This isn't surprising, though it does suck that employees have to jump through these hoops to avoid having our work claimed by employers.

The way to go is to never use company resources or company time when working on personal things and also never work on something that they'd want.

Sometimes it's convenient to break the first 2 rules so it's annoying to make sure to never use my work laptop/internet/office when working on personal stuff, but it's doable. The last bit is certainly quite tricky when you're at Google but I'm at Canva (design+marketing softwares) so all of my stuff is fine.

For stuff you'd like to monetise we send an email to our 'bosses' about it and they give an upfront a-OK.

> Sometimes it's convenient to break the first 2 rules so it's annoying to make sure to never use my work laptop/internet/office when working on personal stuff, but it's doable.

For me, remote work makes this very easy. My office is a bedroom in my apartment. My internet plan. I have a work laptop, strictly for work stuff, and my own laptop right next to it. I don't work on my own projects on company time, but I might on a lunch break (when I'm clocked out).

(I occasionally use my own laptop to help with work stuff though -- having an extra device with an ethernet port comes in handy for tcpdumping stuff without having to try isolate the traffic I want from everything else going through the work laptop)

What does a trillion dollar R&D company NOT work on?

I've been able to alter that "we own your crap" section of every employment contract I've needed to. Don't sign. speak up. Carefully write and submit a reasonable alternative. This may be harder with megacorps...

With the prior company it was basically just altering it to say they don't own anything I created prior to my employment even if i continue to work on it and that I would give them notification for new projects.

This is a bit easier when your company does _one_ thing and you simply don't write any code related to that industry on your free time. Harder with a Google that does pretty much everything.

In general, you have the power to alter this and your NDA, as long as your suggestions are reasonable. I find it best to use my programmer brain and simple language to write out a very precise bit of replacement language and give it to them as a suggestion of what you want.

My co. just updated their NDA and I noticed my changes from when I was offered a job in the new version.

Mind mentioning which companies? I’ve tried in all companies I’ve worked with (some FAANG, some medium sized companies) and none of them are willing to even touch terms including IP assignment clauses. Without exception it was “Sign it unmodified it GTFO!”

I was lucky that I've always had my own projects/products and I was employed as a full time software developer only once in my life. During the hiring they brought me a contract that had this sleazy IP clause. I told them that there is no way I can sign anything like that but will be more then happy to sign simple and fair non compete clause. The employer did just that: they replaced the IP ownership clause.

For what it's worth, this is something we've struggled with at New Vector (vector.im), the company we set up to keep the core Matrix.org dev team gainfully employed. On one hand, we don't want a nightmare where a rogue employee goes and claims that the work they did on the day job is actually their personal IP and tries to relicense or patent it somehow. On the other hand, 90% of what we do is open source and it's critical to let everyone keep hacking on their personal FOSS projects unencumbered.

The current UK employment contracts try to solve it with this construct: 10.2.1 is a general "everything you do belongs to the company", and then 10.2.2 carves out "...except for stuff you do in your spare time, if it's unrelated to your dayjob work". We (happily) haven't had to try it in anger yet, but hopefully it's a reasonable enough compromise. Pretty much everyone in the UK had unilateral "everything you do belongs to the company" contracts in previous gigs, so in theory it's an improvement.

---

10.2.1 You shall give the Company full written details of all Inventions and of all works embodying Intellectual Property Rights made wholly or partially by you at any time during the course of your employment which relate to, or are reasonably capable of being used in, the business of the Company. You acknowledge that, save as set out below, all Intellectual Property Rights subsisting (or which may in the future subsist) in all such Inventions and works shall automatically, on creation, vest in the Company absolutely. To the extent that they do not vest automatically, you hold them on trust for the Company. You agree promptly to execute all documents and do all acts as may, in the opinion of the Company, be necessary to give effect to this clause 10.2.

10.2.2 The above is subject to it being agreed that Intellectual Property Rights created by you outside the reasonable scope of your work for the Company and not related to the business of the Company (provided in any case that they are created outside working hours) may be retained by you. This policy seeks to strike a balance between providing creative freedom for employees to pursue their own interests outside of work with an understanding that creations and advances which should properly be for the benefit of New Vector or Matrix will be assigned to the relevant one of them.

The problem is "related to the business of the company". For a small company, that may seem reasonable, because the company probably only does one or two things. However, for a large company like Google, that basically means "everything".

In my opinion, the right approach is to instead talk about your work duties at the company. If you work on your own time on something unrelated to your work duties, but related to someone else's at the company, you should still get to keep full rights to your work. If you weren't asked to do that work for your job, why would the company have a right to the result, even if they find they have some interest in it?

This Joel on Software article seems relevant: https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2016/12/09/developers-side-pr...

I totally disagree with the sentiments though and would prefer copyright to be transferred on a project by project basis. Why do businesses seem to say that it's so difficult to know what should be owned by the company you work for? Surely a well run company has a clear understanding of what a developer is working on at work. They own everything to do with that and nothing else right?

And yes, if I start a search engine competitive with Google in my spare time I suspect they own the search engine, but if I start a second hand clothing app they do not! I seriously do not understand where the difficulty is in defining this?

When I was renegotiating my contract, Software Freedom Conservancy reminded me that everything is negotiable, so I negotiated ownership of all open source code I produce for my employer in addition to the existing ownership of side projects.

https://sfconservancy.org/contractpatch/ https://lists.sfconservancy.org/pipermail/contractpatch/2018...

This is why the need for aliases and anonymity is crucial in these situations. Do your thing but if you value it, take necessary precautions.

Google could claim ownership and damages if you deliberately hid a successful side project from them. Even if they didn't find out, the risk would certainly be enough to scare off any potential investors or disrupt an exit.

The tweeter admits that Google's policy has changed since then.

"I guess they've realized this was a dumb policy, because under the current rules what I did was totally fine."

That's just about the process for a single off patch. Not claiming copyright on what employees do in their own free time/before starting to work at the company.

This is the reason I left Amazon. Google has IARC, at least, which provides a path for employees to retain copyright. Amazon has no such avenue, and they furthermore restrict who you can work with -- want to make a game in your spare time? You cannot do it with people who are not Amazon employees.

One of the things I remember from my amazon employment is a similar draconian policy which is also overbearing due to the fact that Amazon wants to sell everything from all birds knock offs to scaleable databases.

One thing I thought was particular heavy handed was that the policy also stated that in addition to general fears of amazon claiming ownership of your project, if you needed some kind of cloud service, it required you use AWS for those services.

It's less ridiculous than it sounds. AWS is super careful about not using competing clouds - I think because if AWS employees use other clouds, it opens AWS up to some sort of legal liability/claims of copying.

Again, this is on a personal project.... Amazon shouldn't even have the right to claim ownership of it, yet alone be concerned about the repercussions of owning it

As a couple people mentioned on the twitter thread, it is possible to negotiate this line out of your contract with Google (the one about relating to google's business).

I did so with google, and also with apple.

Is California the only state in the U.S. where a company can not legally claim ownership of your side projects as long as they do not relate to company business?

I will eventually move out of the Bay Area, and this is my biggest concern for a new job. Financially, I don't have enough saved up to just quit and work on a startup for a year, but I also don't want my full time employer to own a side project that ends up being successful. What is the best way to handle this? How amenable are companies outside of California to negotiating away the invention assignment clause?

"usbmuxd was rejected without an explanation. My follow-up email asking for clarification was ignored."

Isn't it funny that Google employees themselves at least sometimes can taste how other Google "products" feel when their accounts are banned, deleted and there is zero ways to appeal such decisions?

I think most Google employees are aware of that problem and wish there was a better support structure in place. They aren't paid 300k per year to deal with some random account request though, they are paid to write systems that deal with one billion accounts, so there is not much opportunity there. Until the tech giants hire massive support workforces, this isn't something engineers can do anything about.

Well someone did wrote all those automated banhammer scripts, right? I don't think DMCA requires automated ban system, Google invented it voluntarily.

Hey, I had nothing to do with Content ID. I was more worried with making sure that all those times Google says it will let you delete your personal data and/or anonymize it long-term, that they did and that whole system was working properly. People love to say Google gobbles user data forever, but when something was supposed to be deleted and wasn't, it was me and my team who got woken up at 7AM.

People like to demonize large corporations, and Google has been going downhill, but the vast, vast majority of people working for Google are trying to do good work. Big corporations have this uncanny ability to behave worse and worse even when they're full of good people.

Many years ago, thankfully, I was commenting to a coworker that a hallmark of a good relationship is that the 'whole is greater than the sum of its parts', but in a company without the right culture, that the whole is often far less than the sum of its parts. And in the worst cases, the whole is worse than any of its parts. And this is how you get good people working together to do bad things.

At the time, I felt that this describes the phenomenon but didn't excuse the phenomenon. And while I have a bit more of a 'shit happens' philosophy today, I also still believe that 'the cost of freedom is eternal vigilance', and so I'm not sure my opinion on that subject has really changed that much. On the whole, I know that you can't foresee and prevent all problems. But, you can judge people by how they react when the problems are identified.

Which is why I delete Google recruiters. Why I couldn't follow a mentor to Ballmer's Microsoft when he asked. Why I declined the 'to hire' clause of the contract-to-hire mobile company where I was making great headway defusing a difficult lead engineer and a more difficult business unit (because every penny they made was off of Dark UI patterns). And why the short contract my company pushed me into at Amazon cost me politically.

We know the values we hold dear by the costs they incur. Not all of those costs are readily apparent to others, and the Internet is always quick to judge. But if they aren't apparent to you, then it might be time for some introspection.

What's really funny to me is Google trying to claim copyright on a GPL project.

Downvoted for facts?

And at-will employment turns unenforceable laws into binding contracts. Sick.

Idiotic policy. Side projects are one of the best way to learn new skills (they're the entire basis for my current skillset in this industry!). I often find that I import lessons and technologies learned in my freetime to my day job as opposed to stealing niche lessons from work. This fact basically makes my side projects akin to ongoing training that my employers aren't paying for but are reaping value from.

Not only is it unfair for these companies to leverage their power to try and claim ownership over side projects, but they're actively shooting themselves in the foot by discouraging a massive and free source of continuous education for their employees.

I've always thought the legal should be restricted to stuff you do in your job for the company rather than stuff the company does. I think it's fair for a company to say a person who does X for the company can't work on X in their spare time for sufficiently restrictive X (e.x. a very specific domain of expertise so not something broad like programming) where they might be jeopardizing company IP or using trade secrets to write external code. I don't think it makes sense for the company to be able to say that for everything the company does even if you have no contact with it. This creates some edge cases and challenges when the scope of your work changes but I think it's far fairer to have to hand off projects at that point than it is to have to hand off projects just for working at the company. It's a bit tricky because if a company only tangentially lets you work on something you may want to do projects to improve your expertise in that area without having to hand over all rights to said projects to the company. There is a legitimate concern about people doing near copies of their company work at home or withholding ideas in their job in order to use those ideas in a personal project. The current balance favors companies too strongly however.

It's not a problem for small projects that you don't intend to do anything interesting with. However it still sucks because you never know if some widget library you create, even if you create in secret without your name on it, suddenly makes a $1MM. What happens the name your name gets leaked that you are the main project contributor. Will some lawyer at the companies you worked on for the last 10 years be looking at monetizing your work?

TRWTF is doing the IARC process. The author should have just "failed" to declare it.

Then when it came for the exit interview, not mention their side projects.

Keep calm and carry on.

Speaking of which, is "20% time" still a thing at Google?

> usbmuxd (iPhone USB comms daemon)...was rejected without an explanation

This is development of a tool that helps a competitor's product. And it's not like Android was a random side project no one knew about. This, and developing an iOS app, are the border of doing work that's against Google's interests.

with online computing where is the line drawn for employee vs employer equipment? lets say i have a personal aws account and i ssh into an ec2 instance, but use my employers laptop to access it to have the information displayed. The same can also be said for a home computing resource. Who's also paying for the electric for that equipment to be used? My employer provided laptop wouldn't run if I didn't pay my personal electric bill. I think there's likely a big gray area that hasn't been explored yet. I've not heard of any cases where any of this comes into play.

My current employer has a standard "you own anything you do in your spare time, as long as it's not done on work equipment" clause in the contract. Quite a few people here have side projects, discussion about them is open, and the culture is that of respect for these people and the projects. I get the impression that the company likes people with the motivation and energy to engage in side projects, and practically encourages them.

It's admirable how your employer has the contract clause excluding ownership of any work you do on your own time, on your own equipment. To me, that seems like it should be the standard, common sense.

I noticed Dunbar's number (~150 people) is sometimes mentioned, to attempt to explain how trust in relationships break down in large corporations.

I'm curious, may I ask roughly how big your employer is?

It should definitely be the standard. I agree, it should not even be worthwhile mentioning.

It was still refreshing to see.

We talk about Dunbar's number quite a bit, actually. We're about 2X that, enough for several tribes.

Thank you for answering. I just saw your profile - seeing where you work, I feel a bit silly for so casually asking the question!

The topic of company ownership/copyright on employee side projects seem even more relevant in the gaming industry, where - I imagine - there must be a lot of code/library reuse, common patterns and concepts, where side projects could easily overlap with products.

On one hand, I can see that from a management/legal perspective, it could be difficult to justify the risk, especially as the company scales beyond tens or hundreds of Dunbar-sized social groups.

My impression is that companies founded and managed by programmers tend to have respect and trust for the work being done, with understanding that life-long programmers (in contrast with those just doing it as a job) always have side projects going on - and that such projects are perfect playgrounds for learning, exploration of ideas, creativity and innovation.

People really have the knives out for Google at the moment (see also the firing of people, monopoly allegations, the fake news "controversy"). They're not perfect. But is there any major corporation that DOESN'T claim ip over employee projects during their employment? Side or otherwise.

Does this clause have any teeth?

If I want to work on OSS in my spare time, I'll do so under a pseudonym and won't bother to ask for permissions. If I choose to make a new AGPLv3 project on GitHub, I'll just do so. And if some lawyers decide to nail me, good luck.

So what's the solution / workaround?

I think it's best to be honest with your employer, but if they're gonna claim stake at everything you write - well it sounds like a policy that eventually drives enterprising employees to game the system.

For reference, Google's IARC process is publicly documented here:

https://opensource.google/docs/iarc/

Google really is Hooli...

>> And so I resolved to give zero shits from that point on about their IP ownership policies, and did whatever I wanted in my spare time.

should have done that in the beginning.

I am late to this discussions not sure if I will get an answer.

How is that different to Company Policy not allowing you to have a 2nd Job? i.e You can only have one Full Time Job.

Don't sign a contract if you don't like its content. This can hardly come as a surprise if it is started in the employees contract

Cool, I won't work for Google. Probably ever if this crap keeps up.

"Don't be evil" is looking more and more hollow.

That's common practice for American companies.

Were those side projects done during work hours or using Google's equipment?

Some of the side projects he worked on prior to joining Google.

>Like many Googlers, I had projects I worked on in my spare time. Some of those I carried over from before joining.

>When I joined, I submitted two projects that I was actively working on at the time, largely just maintaining: AsbestOS (yes, those were the PS3 Linux days) and usbmuxd (iPhone USB comms daemon, you probably have it if you have Ubuntu!).

They also said it wasn't during work hours or on googles equipment.

Though, honestly, I doubt I really even agree on the equipment clause when it. When said equipment is a laptop and a phone, using their device would be more about not wanting to carry multiple devices than any interstice value gained by the equipment.

I think this restriction makes more sense in other industries, such as pharmaceuticals, where lab equipment can cost millions of dollars, so employee doing their own "side projects" on it is more real abuse of company property.

I'd typically agree, there is a solid argument there and the premise as a whole makes sense, I just think trivialities should be excluded, and that standard software development is fairly trivial use.

Once you test such software against company owned datasets, it's a different ballgame.

It's crazy that the "using X company equipment" legal basis works at all in those disputes.

Most of the time, "equipment" seems to mean "laptop". IHMO when "equipment" is such a commodity as a laptop, this should never even be an issue.

That's like a newspaper that would claims the work of one of it's journalist who is writing books on his personal time on the basis that the book was written with a pencil he brought home from work.

This is most easily resolved by simply not using a company laptop at any time.

One of the first pieces of advice I got when I joined a big tech company for the first time was to just put the work provided laptop back in it's original box and get my own.

This turns out to be pretty good from a number of angles-- you get an emergency spare plus any kind of crazy bloat ware your job needs you already have a sacrificial host to load it on.

And then you get fired for spreading sensitive company information on non-authorized devices.

It obviously depends what the company rules are. Many are fine with you using a personal laptop so long as you follow rules like encrypted disk, etc.

You're just doing work on your personal laptop? That doesn't mean you own the work you produce so I think it would complicate ownership of the non-work you produce. Best to use the work laptop for work and the personal laptop for personal stuff both for IP and company policy reasons.

> That doesn't mean you own the work you produce

Of course not, it does however eliminate a host of problems resulting from using company equipment including additional complications from efforts you would otherwise own except for using company equipment, or the extraordinarly reduced right to privacy you have on company equipment.

Using separate equipment is also good, but isn't always realistic particularly if your work requires frequent travel.

Obviously this only works out if your employer is okay with you using your own system for work. Years ago almost all were, and I believe today outside of few industries it's still commonly fine.

I would be very surprised if the company didnt want control over the machine, even from a securoty point of view, the idea of using your own hardward for your job is just a red flag.

Don't do it. Also, dont use anything related to work for anything other than work.. It's a tool for the job. Leave it at that.

>the idea of using your own hardward for your job is just a red flag.

It's also extremely common. How many people these days carry separate work and personal phones, for example? (Some do, of course, but I'm pretty sure they're the exceptions.) And, especially anyone who travels a lot probably uses one laptop a lot of the time too.

Is this "best practice"? Probably not. But it's convenient and it's usually not an issue. (Though I fully agree that, if you know something is a potentially borderline issue, it makes sense to wall personal and work off more completely.)

I can see the argument that your personal laptop contained everything related to your work, software, logins, ect, so the conclusion could easily be that everything done there could reasonably be expected to use company equipment and resources.

Just keep it separate.

The context of equipment here is (or should be) "all the expensive equipment in the lab that the employee couldn't possibly outfit themselves with." As you say, a generic laptop is awful close to being a pen and paper these days.

That said, if this sort of thing is a potential issue for you, you're probably better off using a purely personal laptop or desktop that isn't used for work purposes at all.

> That said, if this sort of thing is a potential issue for you, you're probably better off using a purely personal laptop or desktop that isn't used for work purposes at all.

I got a similar clause, and this is indeed what I do. I think it's fair that they get copyright when they provide the software/hardware. It's also simple for me to avoid that, I just use my home computer with my own Windows license (or Linux) for any side projects.

I rejected the previous job offer due to a more general copyright claim to all my ideas ever. The current one only has the "using company equipment".

>The current one only has the "using company equipment".

In that case, it makes a lot of sense just to keep the two domains separate. The flip side of a laptop being a relatively inexpensive piece of semi-commoditized gear if that, if there's a good reason to have a separate computer for personal projects, it's not really a big deal to do so.

This. People need to understand that this isn't a McDonalds and it isn't an issue of making your own fries in the company oil. It's about "did I get my work done" and anything beyond that should be my own business.

But this is the way people think, and the way things are, so I assume that anything I make on company hardware or on company premises or while daydreaming about work or while wearing my company logo tshirt is the property of my employer, and I should probably consult them before selling or open-sourcing it...

No, they weren't.

It is time to deprive large corporations of the privilege of using open source to generate profits based on people’s free work. It is high noon for saas restrictive open source licenses. Spread the wealth along small indie devs.

Do we not remember the famous story where Steve Jobs and Wozniak almost had to give up Apple computers to Xerox? Some say that Xerox couldn't see the use of a personal computer and how big that could be so their own stupidity let it slide if they would have claimed wozniak's work apples computer never would have existed.

I think you meant HP. Wozniak didn't work at Xerox.

The extremely simple and obvious solution is to just not work at Google. The fact that people accept these agreements and then disingenuously rage against them later is utterly baffling to me.

Not sure if you read the thread, but this person's agreement allowed them to own their side projects.

Some issues are a problem across the industry. But also, more importantly, some people like to solve problems in their workplaces and make them better.

Indeed I did read the thread. The author's employment agreement specified that the employee would submit to a process by which Google determines what of his side work it will claim copyright on. To claim that the employment agreement allows employees to own their side work free, clear, and without Google's approval is simply not true.

People's greatest asset is themselves and their time. It is most effective to deprive companies like Google of this asset (which is their lifeblood) as a means of protest and a lever of change. But I do take your point. Frankly, this thread just feels like whinging to me.

I think your response is a fair one, but the counter-argument I'd make to you is that Google is so powerful that if the employees were able to make a change that the ripple effects throughout the industry would be tremendous.

As an individual, it's possible the biggest thing you can do alone is control where you spend your time. But collectively, it's possible the biggest impact of employees would be to change things on the job.

Are we really at the point where we're using 100 tweets to write what should be in a blog post?

To have impact, ideas need to spread. Since most people don’t blog anymore, they can’t reblog other people’s blog posts. But they can retweet other people’s tweets.

This, pretty much. I do have a blog, but 1) it's mildly more annoying to update, 2) I have >30K Twitter followers, I assume maybe 5 people have my RSS feed in a reader somewhere, and 3) I didn't actually expect it to turn out this long, but I was already typing things up into the Twitter boxes, so shrug, and 4) Twitter seems to be the place for this sort of discussion these days; my blog doesn't even have comments.

I'll use my blog for long technical posts though. Those make more sense there.

Of course, you can/should link to the blog from Twitter. But clicking through is still some friction so Twitter alone sort of substitutes for the one or two paragraph blogpost "sketches" I used to write. (I preach creating a blog version of longer threads but I don't really do it myself in practice.)

I don't like it either but I understand why people do it for both the virality and the low friction of getting something written very informally out there easily. I do wish that, when people do it, they'd also compile it into a blog to give it more permanent form.

Anything more than 2-3 tweets I paste into thread reader:

https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1207234468928356352.html

Twitter is cancer, and all we have to combat cancer is chemotherapy for now ;)

We are and we have been for a while now :)

I'm not a fan, but there is one interesting upside--Twitter makes it simple to react to any one of those paragraphs, and spin off another discussion. The emergent graph of reactions is much more fine-grained than what blogs allowed.

Was his name Richard from 'Silicon Valley'?

I'd be very wary to base my legal strategy on DeMorgan. Is it inconceivable that a judge might rule that the intention is clear and a minor clerical error doesn't matter?

I signed a contract, I didn't sign CA labor code which doesn't even apply within the same continent and which the contract does not reference in any way.

I'm pretty sure they can't claim they get to enforce what they intended to write just because I happened to guess what that was by Googling parts of my contract. What I signed is what I signed, and the wording was clear in the contract.

If someone asks you to bring wine or beer to a party, do you usually bring both? Because that would still be valid in an OR statement but basing your ordinary life decisions on boolean logic doesn't always work out like you expect it.

If a contract is written as:

You own things you make on your own time unless you're using company equipment provided: * The thing does not relate to company business * The thing does not result from work you do for the company

It's pretty clear cut what this means and a judge would not care for boolean logic. Of course it's hard to know for sure without knowing the exact wording of the contract.

Yes, I think that if someone asked me to bring "wine or beer" to a party, literally everyone I know would be fine with me bringing a bit of both.

In fact, what would be weird would be someone objecting to my bringing both on the grounds that they meant, but didn't say, "xor".

I don't think this contract is ambiguous in natural language. Or is generally inclusive, and if you want xor you either write xor or use some cumbersome circumlocution.

I would call them out if they object and was to sloopy to write "either X or Y"

XOR is the natural use of or in English. Do you want to get subs or pizza? Are you going to vote for A or B?

Logical OR is often written as ‘and or’. Do you want to see a movie and or get dinner? https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/And/or

That said it’s not a universal standard and like most of English has wide regional differences.

I think whether "or" means inclusive or or xor is in fact ambiguous and determined by context in English. I think if you as a megacorp write ambiguous contracts and try to enforce them against your employees, you do not deserve a sympathetic interpretation from the courts.

In fact such interpretations of contract ambiguities (in favor of weaker party) are even codified in some countries, most notably the whole of EU [1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contra_proferentem

That or is not really a XOR becomes clear when you negate it. I don't want subs or pizza. I am not going to vote for A or B.

I would say OR is the natural use, and exclusion is implied by the context in these examples.

There are plenty of examples where A and B is treated as a negation of A or B. “Do you want A or B? Why not both?” As one example from a popular mime. https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/why-not-both-why-dont-we-have...

I'm sure they would be fine with it, but that would not be what they expect. As others have pointed out the common implication of "or" in English is really XOR.

> You own things you make on your own time unless you're using company equipment provided: * The thing does not relate to company business * The thing does not result from work you do for the company

While "on your own time" and "using company equipment" are reasonably clear concepts, the other two clauses are too debatable to be an acceptable risk. It's not a matter of Boolean logic.

There was an explicit "or", it wasn't just two clauses in a list. And "or" vs "xor" doesn't make any sense here, if it were "xor" then Google would own anything you did by actual default (i.e. that had neither anything to do with Google's business nor resulted from work done for Google), which makes no sense. It is explicitly an "or" and clearly means inclusive or, not exclusive or.

The rational can't be entirely wrong. In tech, skills and ideas gained during employment help generate new ideas. Since you are paid and trained, there is this incentive to profit from everything you produce.

Companies use tricks such as 'coded on the corporate hardware', 'non compete agreement' etc.

Grow some common sense, do all your side project strictly outside office hours, on your own hardware, in domains that don't even remotely relate to what your employer's industries , and it will be very hard for the emplying organisation to come after you.

I could inspect everything my organisation does, how they do it, then bake something up that technically outperforms it, then quit and work on marketing, again Leveraging everything I've learned, their mistakes and success. Would that be fair?

On the contrary, working for an optic company and developing oil drilling optimisation methods to sell once in quit, would they even come after me? It's fair, won't trigger any suspicion or even interest in pursuing litigation.

in domains that don't even remotely relate to what your employer's industries is hard when your employer is as big and wide-ranging as Google.

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