The company I currently work for sadly claims all IP. Not just the things I do for the company but all IT related stuff I do in my free time and even all non IT related things. I could write cook book and it would belong to them. I tried to get that changed but they were only willing to cede IP rights to non IT related products but will still remain a usage right. At least they are willing to transfer all rights to coworkers or me if we ask them to do so for a private project. But even though they seem willing to grant exemptions I'm put off by such contracts. At the end of the day only the contract matters and good will does not.
GitHub lets staff own IP developed for personal projects using company resources
131–140 of 484 posts
Re: GitHub lets staff own IP developed for personal projects using company resources
#132Earlier quoted context omitted.
Employment is dead, contract is the way of the future. Do you really want to buy into a feudalistic legacy organizational model knowing that the odds of rising up in the pyramid are approximately zero? And they're going to downsize with no loyalty if needed to bump the stock price later on. Like a decapitated chicken the company will strut around a bit randomly canceling or creating projects so you have no control ov…
Employment is lower risk. It's tougher to fire employees than contractors, so there's lower firing risk for employees. It also reduces your work overhead for stuff that HR can take care of for you (health insurance, life insurance, etc). As well as sick days. And at some places, this lets you focus on larger problems that you'd never get solved working from contract to contract.
> It's tougher to fire employees than contractors
I keep reading this here, but this doesn't square with the reality I see all around me (this may be specific to the USA). I've observed plenty of people getting fired, sometimes on short notice and for non-obvious reasons, often only known to the employer and employee. As someone who does not run a business, could someone explain to me the details about exactly what makes firing someone "difficult" for an employer?
Re: GitHub lets staff own IP developed for personal projects using company resources
#133Earlier quoted context omitted.
Ok. Now imagine you are getting twice as much after taxes for the same work but without benefits. Would you still be as happy? Hell, even 50% more. And you are spreading the work across multiple clients so any one client 'firing' you is suddenly not a huge thing since your income is distributed across multiple clients. Sure, you don't get paid benefits, but you get higher income and the ability to work for multiple c…
> Now imagine you are getting twice as much after taxes for the same work but without benefits. No, I wouldn't. I value stability and simplicity in my life, and I will gladly eschew higher pay for a more traditional lifestyle. I'm a conservative suburbanite with no ambition, and I'm proud of it. On top of that, non-employer insurance is terrible. In some states, you actually cannot get a PPO unless you're on an emplo…
"(I refuse to get an HMO for moral reasons)"
Can you elaborate on this?
Re: GitHub lets staff own IP developed for personal projects using company resources
#134Look, this is nice for github employees, but it's worth noting that this is not an easy decision for all companies to make. We (developers) aren't like factory workers cranking out widgets by the hour. We're paid to think deeply about challenging problems. For me, that means chewing on a problem for a long time, often when I'm not at work. Honestly, when a problem is challenging, I can't get it out of my mind. I'm th…
Companies can't track your thinking. They can know when you're using their equipment. I'm fine with them owning what I do with their hardware, networks, anything they pay for... but they can not own my off-time, and they most certainly do not own my mind.
What I build in my offtime is mine; this is in fact where every entrepreneur starts. What you're proposing is that all innovation should stay in the hands of the employer, and you as an employee are shackled at all hours.
I know that some states have different laws in this area, but CAs are strong, and no one owns what you do when off from work and using your own equipment but you. Do not ever give up that right or we all lose.
Re: GitHub lets staff own IP developed for personal projects using company resources
#135Look, this is nice for github employees, but it's worth noting that this is not an easy decision for all companies to make. We (developers) aren't like factory workers cranking out widgets by the hour. We're paid to think deeply about challenging problems. For me, that means chewing on a problem for a long time, often when I'm not at work. Honestly, when a problem is challenging, I can't get it out of my mind. I'm th…
> When a savvy software company hires someone, they understand that [thinking deeply about a work problem, even during nights and weekends] is how developers operate.
This isn't really the _reason_ that companies have these kinds of policies though... Ultimately companies have a legal problem of sorting out what they own from what they don't. This is especially important when the company sells it's assets. The default/simple approach is to try and "own everything". (Not saying this is good for employees, but it is simple for companies.)
Re: GitHub lets staff own IP developed for personal projects using company resources
#136Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's an absolutely absurd request. I can understand if they said that you wouldn't be able to work on your game during business hours, or on your company machine, but to request that you dissolve your company and sell them your IP? That's insane
"It's worth $1B. Still want to buy it from me?"
I don't see a problem with this. If you put a price on that work, and they meet that price, seems like an equitable exchange.
Re: GitHub lets staff own IP developed for personal projects using company resources
#137I work at a large law firm that represents a lot of software companies. Our standard employee agreement forms have the usual default (company owns everything you create with its resources or that relates to the scope of your employment).
This default has always amused me because lawyers never sign these kinds of agreements with their own law firms. We spend most of our time writing contracts, memos, and other bits of work product that, in theory[1], are protected by copyright. Ethics rules and professional norms also give the clients rights in the work product they pay us to produce. A firm's partnership agreement might address this too. But most firms don't even try to address who owns the underlying IP rights.
Moreover, it is extremely common for partners moving between firms to take all of their forms with them. The result is that people treat contract forms as-a sort of IP-free zone. It would not even be possible to ascertain the original authorship of most form contracts that cross my desk.
Historically, this hasn't mattered because law firms charged for hours worked. It will matter a great deal if firms shift toward offering more automated products that can be sold outside the billable hour.
[1] As with source code, there's also uncertainty about which aspects of a contract are expressive and which are purely functional. Only the expressive parts are protected by copyright.
Update: one project I've had in the back of my mind is to illustrate this point by crawling the SEC's EDGAR website and tracing the "genealogy" of bits of contract language in public companies' filings. (Companies need to file certain "material agreements"). If anyone has some suggestions for good text processing libraries that can help with this tracing, I would love to hear about them.
Re: GitHub lets staff own IP developed for personal projects using company resources
#138I work at Wolfram Research (The company that makes Mathematica and Wolfram alpha). Our company also supports and encourages employees to work on personal projects. We are also allowed to responsibly use (not draining bandwidth running games all night or run bitcoin miners) office resources for personal projects.
Re: GitHub lets staff own IP developed for personal projects using company resources
#139This is just putting into a contract what ought to be considered normal and reasonable defaults. I don't think they deserve special praise for it, rather companies that don't do this deserve criticism. Whenever I've encountered overly grasping IP clauses in contracts I've always had them re-written so they only cover work which is done during working hours or related to . No employer has ever objected to this, they u…
> No employer has ever objected to this I've not had this luck, personally. They are always willing to forgo the job offer just to ensure that everyone has the same contracts. I'm guessing that it's going to be a size of business issue. And the IP assignment clauses are, for the most part, getting worse and worse; my current one extends the assignment to a year after termination, voluntary or not.
Same here. In the past, I've tried negotiating the boilerplate IP assignment agreements tied to a new job and, in every single case/company, I was contacted by legal with a very clear demand to "sign it unmodified or GTFO".
For you Captains of Industry who are somehow able to negotiate your employment agreements, congratulations on having that opportunity--but I think that situation must not be very common.
Re: GitHub lets staff own IP developed for personal projects using company resources
#140Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's an absolutely absurd request. I can understand if they said that you wouldn't be able to work on your game during business hours, or on your company machine, but to request that you dissolve your company and sell them your IP? That's insane
"It's worth $1B. Still want to buy it from me?"
"But for you, I like the cut of your jib, $100M."