Google claims copyright on employee side projects

This is not necessarily "give up". You still own the code that was written before you joined the company. If it is an open source project, your code contributions after you start work will still be open source. They will just be owned by the company, so the resulting code will have some code owned by you, and some code owned by the company. If this is a healthy open source project (such as, say, e2fsprogs), it already has some code owned by Red Hat, some code owned by SuSE, some code by IBM, etc. So the fact that there will be some code written by you, but actually owned by Google, is (everyone repeat after me) No Big Deal.

Now, it's different if your "side project" is under a proprietary license, and you hope to make $$$ some day. In that case, companies like IBM, Google, VA Linux Systems, which have a "all your IP belong to us" will be problematic for you. You can choose not to work for such a company, or you can choose to try to negotiate with the company.

But for a side project which is an open source project, in general there won't be a problem. Now, if said open source project directly competes with a proprietary product sold by that company --- you had better disclose it up front during the hiring negotiations, and have a negotiation about how it should be handled. The fact of the matter is, the company doesn't have a right to your services, and you don't have a right to a job at that company. You negotiate it, just like you negotiate cash salary and equity compensation. And if you can't come to a negotiated outcome that both sides are happy with, neither side is evil; they just couldn't come to an agreement.

"Giving up" is an ambiguous term here and I should have tried to be more specific. But I wasn't just referring to ownership. If I'm working on a project, and joining Google means I need to stop working on it for 3-4 years, then I've effectively given up that project, in the sense that it's no longer going to be maintained or stay relevant.

I'm unlikely to go back to a 3-4 year old project and pick it up again later. Most of those projects are dead.

> So the fact that there will be some code written by you, but actually owned by Google, is (everyone repeat after me) No Big Deal.

Sure, unless your company is Oracle and they decide X years later to say, "actually we own the code and we didn't authorize it to be Open Sourced, and that means the entire project is infringing."

People are so ready to say that terms like this are no big deal. If it really doesn't matter who owns the code that gets contributed to an Open Source project, then why is it important that Google own it? If Google isn't going to exploit that code in any way, then they shouldn't have a problem with their employees retaining ownership, right?

> Now, it's different if your "side project" is under a proprietary license

I think it's unrealistic and unreasonable to assume that every time an employee enriches themselves outside of work, they'll be doing it in relation to an Open Source project.

It's also ignores the fact that a nontrivial portion of Silicon Valley was built on top of people who didn't accept those terms. We can say this stuff is standard and it all comes down to individual choice, but we have pretty decent data that universally getting rid of noncompetes was good for the software industry. We have reasonably decent data that allowing employees to work on commercial side projects outside of work would similarly be good for the industry.

Labor laws just haven't caught up yet to that point.

> Neither side is evil; they just couldn't come to an agreement.

I do think that these policies are unethical, that they amount to a kind of attempted takeover of employee autonomy on a level that a business owner shouldn't even be trying to restrict.

However, that wasn't the argument I was making when I said this was absurd. I was just making the observation that most businesses don't have as much money as Google to throw at people or to offer them dream jobs. So most businesses who attempt this are giving up any chance of hiring the best developers, because on average the best developers won't tolerate those terms unless they come attached to Google money and a dream job.

Obviously, direct competition or conflicts of interest are another story, but nobody is debating them. It's a mistake to start from, "direct conflicts of interest should be avoided", and then immediately extrapolate from there to "a business should own everything that comes out of an employee, anywhere."

I don't see the point in arguing about what most theoretical cases are when we can instead talk about the actual case that actually happened here. It's difficult to argue that OP stole anything, and they weren't competing with Google, and OP is saying that they didn't use company resources to build anything.

Unless your claim is that OP actually did something wrong, the rest of it a little too theoretical for me.

I've written this elsewhere, but if obvious abuses were all that companies cared about, the terms wouldn't be written so broadly as to cover everything. A contract is not the place to put an egregious term and then say, "don't worry, we won't enforce it." Treat contracts like they will be enforced.

In particular, we've seen this pattern with arbitration agreements. How many women signed Google's arbitration agreements when they joined under the (false) assumption that, "of course for something serious like sexual abuse, Google wouldn't enforce that"?

> you should always tell your employer that you've started working on something and have it acknowledged as yours way before any valuable IP is created

I do heavily agree with you on this.

Don't do what OP did and just ignore the terms, be up front about what you're doing. It just removes doubt. And don't be afraid to walk away from a company if they won't negotiate on this kind of stuff. You want to be in a trusting relationship with your employer.

Non-competes are illegal in California