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Comment by lrvick | Hacker News Reader

In California you can just open source it and do not need permission as long as you did it on personal time on personal hardware without referencing proprietary IP.

Sure, a company could not like you doing that and find a reason to fire you, but they have no valid legal recourse and you may even be able to sue them for wrongful termination.

We are one of the only states that prevents employers from having ownership of your brain on personal time.

Corpos have tried to claim ownership of things I did in my personal time, multiple times. I just show them this law and they back down immediately.

Having rights to my own brain is a big reason I live in California, cost of living be damned.

https://california.public.law/codes/labor_code_section_2870

IANAL, but know your rights!

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There are two exceptions listed on 2870, the first one is going to be the gotcha. It excludes inventions that:

> (1)Relate at the time of conception or reduction to practice of the invention to the employer’s business, or actual or demonstrably anticipated research or development of the employer;

So, if you work at $BIGCO, they will argue that since they have their fingers in everything, that anything you might work on "relates" to their business or actual or demonstrably anticipated R&D. This is a truck-sized loophole.

Ah, fair. More great reasons to never work for a megacorpo.

There is not a paycheck big enough to make me give up the freedom to do whatever I want with my personal engineering time.

I have only worked for employers that do just one thing, so this law offers me lots of protection.

Note that this is also an enormous part of the reason why CA is a world tech hub. I hear other US states claiming they want to build a similar reputation. “So, you’ll pass laws giving employees ownership of their own personal projects they make on their own time?” “LOL, no!” “Alright, good luck Tupelo.”

The other big reason is their glorious refusal to honor non-compete clauses. As I understand it, this was a big reason a lot of tech companies moved from Boston to CA back in the day.

Yep, that’s another huge benefit.

The short version is, what do you know, if you make it easy for smart people to start new companies for their big ideas, they’ll do it. And if you don’t? You don’t become a tech hub, no matter what else you’re doing.

Wait, other states claim ownership of personal projects made in their own time? How in the world is that legal?

Give you one guess which entity in that transaction wrote the laws.

Something something the idea must have come from something they saw at work, obviously.

I bring this up constantly, even to the point of trying to figure out if US states can have "embassies" in other US states.

I was once advised to take a vacation to California every year and do all my thinking then. But I hate wasting fuel, and it'd be so much more fun to say "this little park in the middle of Detroit is actually California soil", and just walk down there every few weeks with my notepad, and ponder what problems need solving and how.

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