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Comment by miken123 | Hacker News Reader

> The wording specifically says that they own anything I conceive of while working for them.

That's quite normal, at least under Dutch labour law. It prevents IP discussions if an employee does anything outside of the 9-5 working hours, or anything they were not directly instructed to by their manager.

Of course there can be exceptions, e.g., we exempt open source software by default, and are open for any discussions on other side projects the employee may have. But the concept that all your programming work belongs to the company is not that strange.

Also note that this is not a non-compete, but simply an IP clause.

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> But the concept that all your programming work belongs to the company is not that strange.

It is absolutely strange that they’d think they own anything that I do outside of the 8 hours a day I work for them.

I get some of my best ideas, those related to my job, in the shower.

Much of my value is in designing solutions to technical challeneges, not in cranking out lines of code.

This gets even more complex if I get an idea that builds on something I only learned due to my position, but itself isn't directly related to my role. If I could only have ever conceived my idea due to proprietary info, who gets the IP?

While there are grey area's companies have used these type of provisions in extreme ways like claiming they owned a work of fiction by an engineer that worked for the company.

For example do you believe it would be ethical for a company to claim ownership over a "hot new angry birds" game that goes viral simply because they have a IP clause in their employment contract covering the employment of that programmer who also works on their LOB ERP Application?

It should be in very limited to at minimum the type of work I do, one should not have to surrender their mind over to the company for their wages

>But the concept that all your programming work belongs to the company is not that strange.

That we've acquiesced and allowed the situation to fester means that such clauses are not unusual. They are, however, in the grand scheme of things very, very strange.

"Not unusual" and "not cretinous" are not the same thing.

I don't see the problem with it. Think of this scenario from the perspective of an employer:

- You hire someone and they create something and use it as part of your software. - They leave. - Then they sue you because they say you are using their software that they created in their spare time.

Or any of the other 999 IP disputes that can arise from not being very clear about who owns the IP of things your employees create.

This is specifically in the context of programming work done outside of the work for the company. These onerous clauses attempt to lay claim to that work. For example, if a I work at Widgetron writing Widget APIs this clause might be used by Widgetron to lay claim to, say, a game engine I’m writing at home during the evening.

That is easily avoided by having them sign off on the code they commit to the employer's repository. Giving the employer full rights over every single thing the employee creates just to solve such a simple problem is ridiculous.

Then say "the employee grants employer a non-exclusive (exclusive if the work is directly related to the company business as of time the work is conceived), non-transferable, sub-licenseable licence to use, modify, resell or redistribute all works related to employment (even if tangentially), including modified versions thereof, for commercial and business purposes only", not "intellectual property of anything and everything done by employee relating to employer's business, regardless of whether it relates to employee's work, belongs to the employer".

I see a problem with it, Think of this scenario I work as a programmer writing a boring LOB application, in may spare time I write sci-fi fiction stories

the company falls on hard times, cuts my pay but I happen to submit one of my books to a publisher, it becomes a HUGE success and now the company claims to own the right to that book (the money they need to save the company) because they own everything that comes from my mind under these unethical and immoral provisions

It's the default at Google, but if you want to have an open source project or even a side business you can. You have to disclose it first and get sign-off. This seems reasonable to me and avoids any grey areas.

That's not true. If you don't use any work resources and it doesn't compete with google, Google doesn't doesn't own it (at least in California).

The reason they have this progress is that google does so many things that almost anything could be considered competing with Google.

> doesn't compete with google

Alphabet has subsidiaries that work in medicine and autonomous vehicles. You sure your side project isn't competing with the company? You sure you can do so in court when the company comes after you with its top-notch legal team?

> You sure you can do so in court when the company comes after you with its top-notch legal team?

Here is your mistake. The reality is, that they arent going to do that, the vast majority of the time.

The only time when it maybe might happen, is in far out there situations, such as, for example, when that self-driving car guy, built his own multi-hundred million dollar company, on the basis of stolen google documents.

And even then google only went after this guy, after he sold the company to Uber. Before that, google was perfectly fine with the guy running his mult-hundred million dollar company.

Are you going to create a multi-hundred million dollar company, on the basis of literal stolen documents? No? then you almost certainly don't have to worry about it. Nobody is coming after you.

Sadly that's not the case in NY, where I live. I've tried calling my representatives to see if they can propose it for a national law, but I suspect COVID has put this on the backburner.

Is this for anything at all? What if, hypothetically, I want to try out some concepts in angular material to learn? Would I need sign off just to put that in a public gitlab repo (because I get free uncapped CI minutes if it is public). At some point the code should be obvious and silly, right? I mean I’m not doing anything novel here, just learning stuff. It has no commercial value.

You can do whatever you want if it has no commercial value. Google would not bother asserting their rights because your experiments will not grow into a competitor they would care about.

This is for serious side ventures, like you creating a self driving car company on the side. Use common sense, fault on the side of disclosure, and you'll be alright.

you still have to get approval. But the approval is pretty rubber-stampy - my buddy applied for "tasking rtos in rust", which was accepted, despite that being incredibly general. The other side is that "if it is so trivial, why upload it?".

> if it is so trivial, why upload it?

That was clearly answered:

> because I get free uncapped CI minutes if it is public

So if a newspaper writer is working on a novel during their evening hours, the newspaper should own it? Everyone would agree that's ridiculous, why should it be tolerated in software?

That is unfathomable to me, especially in Europe. If I dream of making my own app during the night, I don't own it?

To me, this is a form of slavery, giving away a life's work for a salary.

How does that work? I have a hard time believing this. If they employee writes a sci-fi novel in their free time, does the company own the copyright for that?

This is why we need a union. If you take my contract word for word my company owns the copyright for photos of my family vacation, the awful songs I wrote with some friends a few years ago and even this comment.

You'd have to be pretty desperate to sign such a contract for anything less than 10 million usd a year.

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