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Google claims copyright on employee side projects

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Re: Google claims copyright on employee side projects

#131

Post by Xylakant »

q3k wrote: post #114
fierarul wrote: post #104

> Oh, please. It's standard industry practice for companies to claim ownership of everything a software engineer comes up with, even "on their own time". In the US. Problem is the US is infecting the rest of the world too, especially through subsidiaries which basically just translate from English the 'standard' employment contract. I had to refuse employment in Romania since the clauses were so broad and basically i…

Can confirm from my experience (~10 years in the industry). I've never even heard of this practice until I applied to Google. None of the EU companies I've worked at before had anything like this. None of the EU companies I've worked at since had anything like this. It's US imperialism, nothing less.

Germany has an entire law around this which came into force 1957: https://www.gesetze-im-internet.de/arbnerfg/__49.html

Many work contracts don't have clauses for inventions related to your field of employment because there's no ambiguity.

Most patches would not fall under the law, but entire libaries or novel approaches might. (basically anything patent-worthy)

Re: Google claims copyright on employee side projects

#133

Post by christophilus »

q3k wrote: post #114
fierarul wrote: post #104

> Oh, please. It's standard industry practice for companies to claim ownership of everything a software engineer comes up with, even "on their own time". In the US. Problem is the US is infecting the rest of the world too, especially through subsidiaries which basically just translate from English the 'standard' employment contract. I had to refuse employment in Romania since the clauses were so broad and basically i…

Can confirm from my experience (~10 years in the industry). I've never even heard of this practice until I applied to Google. None of the EU companies I've worked at before had anything like this. None of the EU companies I've worked at since had anything like this. It's US imperialism, nothing less.

I work in the US and have always had side-projects, and have never signed anything which would give my employer the rights to them. I think this isn't just a US thing, but a US mega-corporate thing, maybe?

Re: Google claims copyright on employee side projects

#134

Post by NullPrefix »

sidpatil wrote: post #39
_trampeltier wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are a lot of things different in the "real" world and the "software" world. Nobody would accept underwear with a build in camera, gps tracker and a microphone wo give the data to x companys. But with a cellphone (almost) everybody is ok. Also if something goes wrong with software, it's the customers problem. The customer accepted the contract with no rights for him (software AS IS, no warranty), nobody would ac…

> The customer accepted the contract with no rights for him (software AS IS, no warranty) That's only specific to FOSS.

Have you read Windows TOS ?

Re: Google claims copyright on employee side projects

#135

Post by Xylakant »

nullc wrote: post #71

At my prior company we explicitly disclaimed copyright interest in employee contributions to a long list of standard open source software which included by reference the entire OIN Linux system definition, specifically to avoid any complication related to employees contributing patches back to the open source tools they used in the course of their work (and accordingly this covered not just work done on their own tim…

I really like that approach - is there any chance to get more information about that list? Like how it was compiled and maintained, maybe even the list itself?

Re: Google claims copyright on employee side projects

#136

Post by brendon9x »

Our lack of IP assignment waiver was red-flagged during a VC due-diligence exercise. It became a non-negotiable item, and we got all our employees to sign a waiver. Our waiver has an exclusion list similar to Google's IARC, but unlike Google we have allowed 100% of all exclusions that employees have submitted.

It did seem the VCs were far more worried about a rogue former employee somehow acquiring IP rights over our core IP than stealing unrelated work from our employees. No-one has been able to explain to me how this might happen though; I suspect it's all paranoia.

Re: Google claims copyright on employee side projects

#137

Post by q3k »

Xylakant wrote: post #131
q3k wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can confirm from my experience (~10 years in the industry). I've never even heard of this practice until I applied to Google. None of the EU companies I've worked at before had anything like this. None of the EU companies I've worked at since had anything like this. It's US imperialism, nothing less.

Germany has an entire law around this which came into force 1957: https://www.gesetze-im-internet.de/arbnerfg/__49.html Many work contracts don't have clauses for inventions related to your field of employment because there's no ambiguity. Most patches would not fall under the law, but entire libaries or novel approaches might. (basically anything patent-worthy)

IIUC this governs patentable inventions, not copyright.

Re: Google claims copyright on employee side projects

#138

Post by kendallpark »

draugadrotten wrote: post #11

Does society accept this behaviour outside tech? Imagine that a Michelin restaurant would claim copyright on the dishes cooked by the chef in his spare time. Or that the big farm would ask for a piece of those carrots grown in the back yard.

> Imagine that a Michelin restaurant would claim copyright on the dishes cooked by the chef in his spare time.

Recipes are not copyrightable in the US. [1] Otherwise, you might see exactly this.

[1] https://www.copyright.gov/help/faq/faq-protect.html

Re: Google claims copyright on employee side projects

#139

Post by [deleted] »

A4ET8a8uTh0 wrote: post #65

I personally think this is just another step in a series of many reminding us that Google has become just another US corporation. And a way those grow is by finding 'efficiencies','doing more with less' and leveraging their size. It is an end of an era. Then again, Jimmy Johns was always pretty bad for the workers and attempted to have kids working there signing non-competes. Maybe we should be happy it took google s…

[deleted]

Re: Google claims copyright on employee side projects

#140

Post by martius »

tytso wrote: post #95

Oh, please. It's standard industry practice for companies to claim ownership of everything a software engineer comes up with, even "on their own time". The problem is it's extremely difficult to say, figure out when someone might have invented some super clever idea which can be pantented "on their own time". This was true when I worked for MIT, VA Linux, IBM, and Google. At VA Linux it was the VC's which insisted on…

I'm a googler, I've got side projects, most of them are open-source.

While I'd prefer not to think about all this and just code, I appreciate that there is an existing policy instead of a bad surprise in a few years.

The current policy, which is 100% public (https://opensource.google/docs/iarc/), is basically "let's assume that we own everything except what we don't, and let's figure things out before it's too late".

If you contribute to an existing open-source project on github, this is basically a non-issue and the answer to who owns the copyright has practically no effect. There are pre-approved licenses and a few banned licenses (agpl, wtfpl, public domain, etc), as well as pre-approved CLAs with major entities (Python, Mozilla, etc).

I think this matters in two cases:

1/ you want to start a new open-source project, you don't want google to have copyright because you think that a good open-source license will not protect you/your work from being stolen (!).

2/ you want to start a side project and maybe one day you'll turn that into a business, and you don't want to be Pied Piper vs Hooli.

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