Google claims copyright on employee side projects • Hacker News Board

Re: Google claims copyright on employee side projects

#271

Post by sitkack » Wed, Dec 18, 2019, 4:27 PM UTC

raphlinus wrote: post #246

Counterpoint: I open sourced a lot of stuff while I was at Google. There is some friction in the open source releasing and IARC policies (one of my projects got denied), but generally the open source teams at Google want you to do good work. And having clear documentation of ownership is actually helpful; there's a lot of dodgy stuff out there where you're not sure who actually has the rights. Contrast to Apple, wher…

You are also famous and had a big OSS presence before joining Google, you worked on Google blessed OSS software while employed there. You are in no way typical of the bullshit other folks have to go through.

Re: Google claims copyright on employee side projects

#272

Post by TimPC » Wed, Dec 18, 2019, 4:27 PM UTC

I've always thought the legal should be restricted to stuff you do in your job for the company rather than stuff the company does. I think it's fair for a company to say a person who does X for the company can't work on X in their spare time for sufficiently restrictive X (e.x. a very specific domain of expertise so not something broad like programming) where they might be jeopardizing company IP or using trade secrets to write external code. I don't think it makes sense for the company to be able to say that for everything the company does even if you have no contact with it. This creates some edge cases and challenges when the scope of your work changes but I think it's far fairer to have to hand off projects at that point than it is to have to hand off projects just for working at the company. It's a bit tricky because if a company only tangentially lets you work on something you may want to do projects to improve your expertise in that area without having to hand over all rights to said projects to the company. There is a legitimate concern about people doing near copies of their company work at home or withholding ideas in their job in order to use those ideas in a personal project. The current balance favors companies too strongly however.

Re: Google claims copyright on employee side projects

#273

Post by kabdib » Wed, Dec 18, 2019, 4:27 PM UTC

My current employer has a standard "you own anything you do in your spare time, as long as it's not done on work equipment" clause in the contract. Quite a few people here have side projects, discussion about them is open, and the culture is that of respect for these people and the projects. I get the impression that the company likes people with the motivation and energy to engage in side projects, and practically encourages them.

Re: Google claims copyright on employee side projects

#274

Post by Mirioron » Wed, Dec 18, 2019, 4:32 PM UTC

katet wrote: post #163

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.

Without diving into the ins-and-outs of this, my current contract contains a claim like this. Well outside the US, and the UK/EU - it's in South East Asia. It says something like "on company equipment" and/or "reasonably related to skills/knowledge gained or applicable during employment with the company". So I wouldn't quite quote this as being US imperialism. I seem to recall similar clauses in my previous contracts…

>reasonably related to skills/knowledge gained or applicable during employment with the company

Let's imagine that you didn't know how to read and write before being employed at that company. If you learn how to read and write during your employment then the company owns rights to anything you write? And they own the rights to anything you make that requires reading too.

This clause essentially tells the employee to go out of their way not to learn anything new while employed at the company. Does the company, by chance, offer training in very broad skills to employees "free of charge"?

Re: Google claims copyright on employee side projects

#275

Post by enitihas » Wed, Dec 18, 2019, 4:34 PM UTC

lumberingjack wrote: post #206

Do we not remember the famous story where Steve Jobs and Wozniak almost had to give up Apple computers to Xerox? Some say that Xerox couldn't see the use of a personal computer and how big that could be so their own stupidity let it slide if they would have claimed wozniak's work apples computer never would have existed.

I think you meant HP. Wozniak didn't work at Xerox.

Re: Google claims copyright on employee side projects

#276

Post by Mirioron » Wed, Dec 18, 2019, 4:35 PM UTC

martius wrote: post #243

majewsky wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Honey, can you carry my shopping into the kitchen?" - "I'm sorry, my skills are to be used exclusively for the benefit of my employer."

Those are not the type of skills listed in your job description (which is part of your contract).

The argument still stands.

"Honey, can you take a look at why this script isn't compiling the shopping list correctly?"

"Sorry, my skills are to be used exclusively for the benefit of my employer."

Re: Google claims copyright on employee side projects

#277

Post by SkyBelow » Wed, Dec 18, 2019, 4:35 PM UTC

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…

>So anyone who think this is some evidence of Google being, or becoming, evil is either seriously misinformed, or just engaging in unthinking hate of Google, or both.

Just because an evil practice was already well adopted does not change that increased adoption of that practice by an entity can reasonably be taken as a sign of that entity's evil quotient increasing.

Re: Google claims copyright on employee side projects

#278

Post by CharlesColeman » Wed, Dec 18, 2019, 4:37 PM UTC

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…

> So, yeah, maybe apply some logic. If the employer owns your brain 24h/day maybe the hourly rate your are getting is not such a great deal.

> And don't get me stared on clauses the survive the contract, including multi-year employment bans to competitors, etc. For a large multinational that basically mean you have to get a job landscaping or something because they compete with anybody would offer you a comparable job for your skills.

> This 'standard industry practice' should die.

Addressing things like these would be a good thing for a tech workers union to take up.

Re: Google claims copyright on employee side projects

#279

Post by crazysim » Wed, Dec 18, 2019, 4:38 PM UTC

mikelward wrote: post #236

martius wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

There's some open source projects Google won't let me contribute to because they don't like the project's CLA.

Is there a public list of these and do these projects know?

Re: Google claims copyright on employee side projects

#280

Post by vageli » Wed, Dec 18, 2019, 4:39 PM UTC

anaphor wrote: post #162

shadowgovt wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you make an excellent point, in particular regarding the fact that this is a US-based policy. US copyright law is extremely friendly to individual creators at the expense of corporations. It makes corporations bend over backwards to avoid getting into a messy legal dispute with somebody that they've employed to create for them. This policy is so broad because if an individual Google employee were to try and c…

Please cite relevant statutes or case law. It's pretty easy to write a contract that only assigns copyright to the corporation for works that were created on company time. That is standard practice for pretty much every job, including non-tech ones.

When does company time start and end for a salaried employee? If I'm working on a side project and get paged to look at something for work, does work time start when I look at the alert? Am I on work time if I answer a work email on a work device with my personal laptop open doing side work at 3 am?