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Google claims copyright on employee side projects

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Re: Google claims copyright on employee side projects

#321

Post by walshemj »

Xylakant wrote: post #281
adventskalender wrote: post #229

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's nonsense. In Germany the default for contracts is that you need your employers permission to do side projects. Germany is in the EU.

That's nonsense. > In Germany the default for contracts is that you need your employers permission to do side projects. You generally need to notify your employer if you take on a second (paid) job. The employer may veto that employment, but must specify a good reason (you can't be in competition, exceed the total legal working hours, bring ill repute to your employer, ...), but the default is "allow". Clauses that r…

I suspect in Germany not informing your employer about other jobs would end badly for you

Re: Google claims copyright on employee side projects

#322

Post by solidasparagus »

julianozen wrote: post #294

One of the things I remember from my amazon employment is a similar draconian policy which is also overbearing due to the fact that Amazon wants to sell everything from all birds knock offs to scaleable databases. One thing I thought was particular heavy handed was that the policy also stated that in addition to general fears of amazon claiming ownership of your project, if you needed some kind of cloud service, it r…

It's less ridiculous than it sounds. AWS is super careful about not using competing clouds - I think because if AWS employees use other clouds, it opens AWS up to some sort of legal liability/claims of copying.

Re: Google claims copyright on employee side projects

#323

Post by walshemj »

Scarblac wrote: post #142
marcosdumay wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I had to refuse employment in Romania since the clauses were so broad and basically illegal under Romanian law. If it's illegal, it's void, isn't it? (Maybe Romania does it differently?)

But it's still against my principles to sign a contract that has clauses I know to be illegal, and that I would never agree with if they weren't.

No actually in the Eu its pretty much legal - with restrictions.

EU law is fairly common across all states so there will be something like the "Masters and Servants" laws that US and UK law has.

Re: Google claims copyright on employee side projects

#324

Post by btilly »

christophilus wrote: post #133
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.

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?

Depending where you work in the US you may have not needed to sign anything because your employer already has that right by default. For example that is true in New York.

It will never get enforced unless there is some other conflict.

Re: Google claims copyright on employee side projects

#325

Post by ryandrake »

lettergram wrote: post #256
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…

Pretty much every company I know does this: > If you take that option then it really has to be done on your own time, and must not use any company resources, meaning not on a company laptop, or on a company network, etc. This is rare, and I'm not aware of many other companies that give employees that option. It’s actually a California law that the company can’t own what you do on your own time with your own equipment…

> It’s actually a California law that the company can’t own what you do on your own time with your own equipment.

This comes up a lot here and is only half true. California law does not protect IP that is similar to what the company does or may do: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21754139

Re: Google claims copyright on employee side projects

#326

Post by hinkley »

marcan_42 wrote: post #209
Yizahi wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well someone did wrote all those automated banhammer scripts, right? I don't think DMCA requires automated ban system, Google invented it voluntarily.

Hey, I had nothing to do with Content ID. I was more worried with making sure that all those times Google says it will let you delete your personal data and/or anonymize it long-term, that they did and that whole system was working properly. People love to say Google gobbles user data forever, but when something was supposed to be deleted and wasn't, it was me and my team who got woken up at 7AM. People like to demon…

Many years ago, thankfully, I was commenting to a coworker that a hallmark of a good relationship is that the 'whole is greater than the sum of its parts', but in a company without the right culture, that the whole is often far less than the sum of its parts. And in the worst cases, the whole is worse than any of its parts. And this is how you get good people working together to do bad things.

At the time, I felt that this describes the phenomenon but didn't excuse the phenomenon. And while I have a bit more of a 'shit happens' philosophy today, I also still believe that 'the cost of freedom is eternal vigilance', and so I'm not sure my opinion on that subject has really changed that much. On the whole, I know that you can't foresee and prevent all problems. But, you can judge people by how they react when the problems are identified.

Which is why I delete Google recruiters. Why I couldn't follow a mentor to Ballmer's Microsoft when he asked. Why I declined the 'to hire' clause of the contract-to-hire mobile company where I was making great headway defusing a difficult lead engineer and a more difficult business unit (because every penny they made was off of Dark UI patterns). And why the short contract my company pushed me into at Amazon cost me politically.

We know the values we hold dear by the costs they incur. Not all of those costs are readily apparent to others, and the Internet is always quick to judge. But if they aren't apparent to you, then it might be time for some introspection.

Re: Google claims copyright on employee side projects

#327

Post by Arathorn »

For what it's worth, this is something we've struggled with at New Vector (vector.im), the company we set up to keep the core Matrix.org dev team gainfully employed. On one hand, we don't want a nightmare where a rogue employee goes and claims that the work they did on the day job is actually their personal IP and tries to relicense or patent it somehow. On the other hand, 90% of what we do is open source and it's critical to let everyone keep hacking on their personal FOSS projects unencumbered.

The current UK employment contracts try to solve it with this construct: 10.2.1 is a general "everything you do belongs to the company", and then 10.2.2 carves out "...except for stuff you do in your spare time, if it's unrelated to your dayjob work". We (happily) haven't had to try it in anger yet, but hopefully it's a reasonable enough compromise. Pretty much everyone in the UK had unilateral "everything you do belongs to the company" contracts in previous gigs, so in theory it's an improvement.

---

10.2.1 You shall give the Company full written details of all Inventions and of all works embodying Intellectual Property Rights made wholly or partially by you at any time during the course of your employment which relate to, or are reasonably capable of being used in, the business of the Company. You acknowledge that, save as set out below, all Intellectual Property Rights subsisting (or which may in the future subsist) in all such Inventions and works shall automatically, on creation, vest in the Company absolutely. To the extent that they do not vest automatically, you hold them on trust for the Company. You agree promptly to execute all documents and do all acts as may, in the opinion of the Company, be necessary to give effect to this clause 10.2.

10.2.2 The above is subject to it being agreed that Intellectual Property Rights created by you outside the reasonable scope of your work for the Company and not related to the business of the Company (provided in any case that they are created outside working hours) may be retained by you. This policy seeks to strike a balance between providing creative freedom for employees to pursue their own interests outside of work with an understanding that creations and advances which should properly be for the benefit of New Vector or Matrix will be assigned to the relevant one of them.

Re: Google claims copyright on employee side projects

#328

Post by dang »

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.

Please don't throw gratuitous nationalistic flamebait into HN comments. We'll get gratuitous nationalistic flamewars that way. Those don't help anybody.

Your comment would be fine without that last bit.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Re: Google claims copyright on employee side projects

#329

Post by cbhl »

brendon9x wrote: post #136

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…

> rogue former employee somehow acquiring IP rights over our core IP

"Rogue ex-co-founder comes out of the woodwork X years later and claims they own half of your thing" is a horror story in startup land; see Facebook for an example of this. (The Social Network movie is a fictionalized depiction, but the real-world drama was sufficiently troublesome for Facebook that they initially weren't planning on engaging with the movie. Last minute they decided to rent a theater to take the whole company to see it, and Jesse Eisenberg started helping Mark Zuckerberg with his public speaking.)

Re: Google claims copyright on employee side projects

#330

Post by julianozen »

solidasparagus wrote: post #322
julianozen wrote: post #294

One of the things I remember from my amazon employment is a similar draconian policy which is also overbearing due to the fact that Amazon wants to sell everything from all birds knock offs to scaleable databases. One thing I thought was particular heavy handed was that the policy also stated that in addition to general fears of amazon claiming ownership of your project, if you needed some kind of cloud service, it r…

It's less ridiculous than it sounds. AWS is super careful about not using competing clouds - I think because if AWS employees use other clouds, it opens AWS up to some sort of legal liability/claims of copying.

Again, this is on a personal project.... Amazon shouldn't even have the right to claim ownership of it, yet alone be concerned about the repercussions of owning it
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