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Ask HN: My company wants my side project. What can I do?

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Re: Ask HN: My company wants my side project. What can I do?

#201

Post by marcinzm »

mcv wrote: post #6

Whether or not your employer can claim ownership in court depends entirely on your contract. But no matter what's in your contact, that route is probably not your best option. From what I understand, you created, in your own time, a project that is valuable to your employer, and that they want to use and develop. You're the expert on this project. Not just that, you designed every aspect of it, popularised it, and yo…

Law and court decisions trump contract.

California, for example, does not allow contracts for ownerships of things done on your own time, your own equipment and not related to your employer.

Re: Ask HN: My company wants my side project. What can I do?

#202

Post by yulaow »

codyguy wrote: post #194
munmaek wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Such clauses would get immediately thrown out.

even if it's explicitly stated in the contract and the employee has agreed to it? Why would it get thrown out?

Some states (don't know in USA, speaking from EU) have laws against "unfair clauses" which make those automatically null even if you accept it. Usally the point is that for each clause in a contract which put an obligation on the employee, the employer must "give something back" to repay for that obligation in equal terms.

In this case in my state the employer should at least have paid for all the time out-of-work in which op worked on his IP, and with a rate established by op

Re: Ask HN: My company wants my side project. What can I do?

#203

Post by terranoct »

codyguy wrote: post #194
munmaek wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Such clauses would get immediately thrown out.

even if it's explicitly stated in the contract and the employee has agreed to it? Why would it get thrown out?

Contracts state a lot of things that don't necessarily hold up. It's just words on paper. Sometimes they're even tenable in one area, then used in another state which disallows some claim or another.

Employment contracts in particular are subject to a lot of restrictions and protections regardless of what the employer makes people sign, because labor laws.

Re: Ask HN: My company wants my side project. What can I do?

#204

Post by hotgeart »

Don't know where you're located. But In EU, the employer only own the code you type at your work (or during your work time if remote) It's in the contract.

He can only bother you if you code for money outside your work. It can be seen as a second job. Again check your contract.

Re: Ask HN: My company wants my side project. What can I do?

#205

Post by rossdavidh »

Just a point to consider: how long would it take you to recreate this work? My guess, not nearly as long as it took the first time. 90+% of the time in coding, is figuring out the problem space in greater detail. Much of the rest is figuring out the best architecture to fit that problem space. Very little is typing and getting the syntax right.

If you have to abandon what you've done, leave, and recreate a new version, would not take you two years. Two months? Less? Not saying this is what you should do, just that you consider what it would entail, if you handed the company your side project and then left to go re-create it from scratch, with all the lessons learned from the first time.

Re: Ask HN: My company wants my side project. What can I do?

#206

Post by clucas »

codyguy wrote: post #194
munmaek wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Such clauses would get immediately thrown out.

even if it's explicitly stated in the contract and the employee has agreed to it? Why would it get thrown out?

There are things that you can't contract away.

An obvious example in the U.S. is that even if you have a contract saying you have to work for someone for no pay, forever, with no possibility of getting out the contract, it would be unenforceable because we, as a nation, have decided that slavery should not be legal.

It turns out, many of these un-contractable issues involve the employer/employee relationship... another example: even if you sign a contract saying your employer doesn't have to pay you overtime, that provision would be thrown out if you challenged it, and would probably get the employer in trouble with various agencies, including the IRS.

I am a lawyer, but I don't have experience in this field, and this is not legal advice (you have to hire me for that), but this issue seems like one that a court (depending on the state, no doubt) would find that it doesn't matter what the contract says, an employer can't own everything an employee does.

To emphasize: this is NOT legal advice, don't rely on it, and you really should seek counsel if you are encountering this issue in real life.

Re: Ask HN: My company wants my side project. What can I do?

#207

Post by pcmaffey »

batoure wrote: post #63
awillen wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Listen to this person. The people telling you to talk to your employer are giving you terrible advice. You can still do that after spending 30 minutes with a lawyer, but you can't take back anything you say before you talk to a lawyer.

Always always always talk to a lawyer. If your dog walker (at the peak of their career) friend was like “I need a website” you wouldn’t be like “learn JavaScript” you would say find a programmer. If I had 10 dollars for every time I had to spend weeks convincing an engineer friend to talk to an attorney and then when they finally did it got dealt with in 30 minutes... Lawyers are just “full stack law architects” do y…

You don’t need javascript to build a website. You don’t need a doctor to solve every health problem. And you don’t need a lawyer to resolve every conflict between people.

Eg. Where would the internet be if only programmers built websites?

Re: Ask HN: My company wants my side project. What can I do?

#208

Post by detaro »

hotgeart wrote: post #204

Don't know where you're located. But In EU, the employer only own the code you type at your work (or during your work time if remote) It's in the contract. He can only bother you if you code for money outside your work. It can be seen as a second job. Again check your contract.

I don't think there is an EU wide standard about what is possible and what isn't in this regard.

Re: Ask HN: My company wants my side project. What can I do?

#209

Post by [deleted] »

colejohnson66 wrote: post #191
trulyrandom wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because they are free to choose to not work for a company that has such an IP clause in its employee contract. They are also free to negotiate a change to that clause.

Theoretically. Not everyone has the liberty to change jobs at will and be fine.

[deleted]

Re: Ask HN: My company wants my side project. What can I do?

#210

Post by chmod775 »

arkano wrote: post #177
amiga_500 wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> In many (most) cases any IP you create does belong to them. Why do Americans consider themselves free?

It can be the same thing in Europe, at least the contracts I've seen say so.

Just because it's there in the contract doesn't mean it's legal.

I'm not sure which European country you are referring to, but as a German I'd look at you funny if you had the audacity to put something like that in an employment contract (but honestly, I very strongly doubt any employer would do so in the first place).

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