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Comment by bacbilla | Hacker News Reader

As someone else has said, it is quite a standard clause. I have had it on most of my contracts, from memory.

I sought an employment lawyer's advice on this once (as part of a larger question). The scenario is heavily affected by common law. I am guessing (as this is HN) that you are working in technology. The way it was described to me is that if you work in, say, banking, and you make your own banking app on the side, this could be argued to be "in the course of your employment". If you made a video game however (or something else unrelated to the business), the law is likely to side with you.

My best advice is to be transparent with your (potential?) employer (assuming you have nothing to hide) and let them know what you do outside of work hours and see if they will amend your contract suitably. If not, spending £250-300 for an hour of an employment lawyer's time is worth it and is likely to resolve your question.

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Thanks for the advice.

"My best advice is to be transparent with your (potential?) employer (assuming you have nothing to hide) and let them know what you do outside of work hours and see if they will amend your contract suitably."

So I'm in this situation at the moment, and I did exactly this. I sought an employment lawyer's advice with my previous contract, any they suggested in future that I do exactly this.

I asked HR/legal for a "background IP form" or "prior list of inventions form" (it goes by different names), so I could list my project and ensure that they approve it.

I revived a blanket response from legal stating that I didn't need such a form because: either my projects fall outside the scope of the clause, in which case I don't need to worry about it, or they fall within the scope of the clause, in which case they are not wavering anything. And finally that it's up to me to judge whether the project fall inside or out of said clause.

Not overly helpful. I've tried to play it safe by getting approval, but it seems to have lead to a dead end. Not sure hiring a lawyer at this point is worth it if the company is entirely unwilling to engage in the standard professional processes.

That sounds like a disappointing attitude from their legal department, but if it's a big company I can see that they don't want to get into those sorts of discussions.

Only you will know the stakes and what you're willing to risk; most judges in the UK are fairly pro-employee and take a dim view of big corporations overreaching their rights (but please don't take this as absolute fact!). If you're not a senior employee and you're doing something like I mentioned in my previous comment (making a game in your spare time), I would personally not worry.

If it's your big idea for your future business and you want to work on it in evenings and weekends, then I would want to be rather more cautious.

Basically the same understanding here (in the US). It's domain specific. I work in finance, so I can't build any investment apps or anything that would potentially compete with my employer. I am allowed to run an unrelated LLC, build a website for it, etc.

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