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Comment by amelius | Hacker News Reader

Computers are just office equipment, just like pens.

If I gave you a pen and you wrote some story with it, then could I claim the rights to that story? I think not.

If you explicitly included a contract that stated how the pen was to be used and the ramifications before my acceptance of your pen then yes.

Companies do include policies about how their equipment is to be used and for what and they do include how they think about ownership usually in your employment agreement or principles of employment policies. To write those off because “hey it’s only a generic piece of equipment” is perilous.

I suspect how you think about the analogy changes if you write the story on company letterhead or if you used the company car for your catering side hustle on the weekends.

This is usually a tax thing.

We have a policy that states, "company equipment can not be used for personal use". As without this company equipment can not be tax deductible. However, in the UK at least, it is a matter of economic policy whether a company makes any effort to in-force.

Thus I hit on what a I thought was a neat solution. Which was to deem it a sackable offence to expend any resource whatsoever including time or materials to identify if company property had been so used.

That last paragraph of yours is key the your whole post. It’s a good illustration of how a large enough difference in degree becomes a difference in kind.

If you use the company car for a side hustle in catering, then that perhaps gives the company the right to fire you or charge you for damages. However, they do not get to claim any intellectual property (recipes you invented for your catering side-job).

I agree with that. In the pen example, they should bill you for the wear and tear on the pen (ball bearings and ink aren't free). In the computer example, same deal. Figure out what a flash memory erase cycle is worth, figure out what bringing the CPU out of its lowest power state costs per minute, figure out how many of each were used, and send an invoice!

It's not that simple. The law recognizes that when signing a contract there is a power-imbalance between employer and employee. It would be different if the contract was written by the employee and signed by the employer.

Exactly this, and they are ubiquitous. With software I think it might be a slightly different matter as the company mighy have access to software you couldn't otherwise afford. But it's a red flag anyways ... why would you ever want to work for someone who'd want to claim ownership to something that is clearly not theirs?

If you make that pen available to me under these conditions? Sure.

If you "just give" me something without any conditions then no, you could definitely not claim that story. But if you make that pen, your property, available to me explicitly only for work and nothing else?

It's your property, not mine. I only have whatever rights you grant me to it.

> If you make that pen available to me under these conditions? Sure.

Let's leave aside whether the law (in whatever country) permits such a one-sided contract, and ask - should it permit it? There are plenty of contract terms that are illegal (i.e. not backed by law), such as usury [1] or various anti-competitive practices, because their enforcement is seen as either unfair, or a detriment to society, regardless of whether they were entered freely. Contracts are not and should not be above the law.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usury#Usury_law

> because their enforcement is seen as either unfair, or a detriment to society

I mean, I do agree with you in general, its just that I do not see this issue as a detriment to society. If someone demands massive interest rates on loans that you need to survive thats definitely unethical.

A company demanding that you do not use their laptop so that you can work on your side projects at home ... well, that doesn't quite sound as bad. There is nothing stopping you from just buying your own device.

Thats like saying "only use the company car for work stuff" ... it just doesn't seem that unfair or unethical to me to be honest.

Let's make this example a little more extreme to show how nonsensical a company claim is on stuff they did not create (or pay for).

If I used the company computer to access a dating-website, then could the company claim ownership of my firstborn child, if that was in the contract?

> If I used the company computer to access a dating-website, then could the company claim ownership of my firstborn child

No, but first kiss is definitely on the table.

Only if you sign the contract!

You don’t get the pen without signing the contract.

You can’t sign the contract without the pen.

I disagree. A vanilla MacBook might be a bit like a pen, but if that MacBook is loaded with a bunch of proprietary or licensed software, I can see why an organization wouldn’t want it being used for financial gain outside of the organization. Perhaps they don’t explicitly “lose” anything, but it’s their investment to have returns on.

If a laptop is like a pen, what about a high end graphics workstation? What about a small server? Internet bandwidth is a cheap commodity, can I run my site from work? Electricity is basically free (I charge my personal scooter at work), what about a small Bitcoin miner?

So you're the one who keeps taking the company's pens ...

More seriously though, there are frequently restictions of the use of office equipment (or business equipment in general). Businesses will often overlook it if it is not a problem, say if you need a photocopy of a rental contract. They have the discretion to say no if the privilege is being abused, say if you started printing hundreds of pages a month for personal use. The misuse of pens is rarely seen as an issue since they hold little intrinsic value and are routinely replaced.

Should they be able to claim the rights to something you produced with their equipment? In most cases, no. I'm not going to say in all cases no since there is always going to be someone who pushes the limits beyond reason. (Say a person develops a piece of software with a company computer to sell on the side. Can that be construed as the business indirectly financing the development of the software by providing hardware and/or software tools?)

In general, it is always a good idea to do personal stuff with personal equipment and business stuff with equipment supplied by the business. I'm sure the coworkers who are searching for the missing pens will thank you for doing so.

I don't know whether you could or couldn't. But if I entered into such a contract, I'd obviously use a different pen, it's not that hard.

Is anyone really running their side businesses from their work laptops? That seems crazy to me.

Strangely it works this way though. It doesn’t make sense. In my current job I refused company equipment, and insisted on using my own. I pay for my own software too.

Safer that way.

That's why they write it in contracts explicitly I guess?

Not everything in contracts is legally binding.

If I write code using some company computer, then the most they could do is charge me for the damages, i.e. the power used or in the worst case I would have to replace the computer.

Yeah, I'm not competent there. My impression is it should be enforceable, at least in the U.S., but I'd contact a lawyer if I wanted to know for sure.

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