Does my company have IP rights to the stuff I do in my spare time?

"If what you are planning to do has commercial value, then make sure to get it checked by a good local lawyer who can guide you through the pitfalls and explain alternatives."

Is being no-longer-employed by your employer an absolute defense, assuming that you can prove that any IP in question was created after the end of your employment?

I'm thinking of the case where an employee does something that's either not of commercial value or lets it revert to his employer's ownership, but then quits and founds a startup (with an entirely new codebase) afterwards.

For example, Marc Andreesen writes a web browser under the terms of his employment with UIUC. He then drops out, moves to Silicon Valley, and founds a company with Jim Clark, presumably with a from-scratch codebase. They get sued for trademark infringement because they name it Mosaic Communications Corp, but UIUC has no legal claim to any of their source code or inventions developed after the end of Andreesen's employment, right, even though he gained quite a lot of experience working on web browsers there?

Or Larry and Sergey start Backrub at Stanford. It becomes Google before they leave Stanford grad school. Stanford obviously owns the PageRank patent because it was developed while they were still students, and they licensed it for a good chunk of shares. However, would Stanford own the original Google logo, forcing Google to redo it when they incorporated as a separate company? How about code - presumably Google licensed the codebase from Stanford, but if they hadn't and had started fresh instead, would Stanford have any claims on the grounds that Larry and Sergey had built an essentially identical product under their employment?

My reference was what I was informed was the law by multiple lawyers when I lived in New York. It is possible that I misunderstood or the rules have changed in the last decade, but I am pretty sure neither is the case. Still you should confirm this with a qualified attorney before accepting what I say as being absolutely true.

More precisely I was told that New York recognizes 3 types of employee relationships. They are hourly, contractor, and professional employee. The first two are obvious. You are aware if you have to punch in on a clock, or are a contractor. The default for software development is therefore the third.

As a professional employee there are no set place or hours for your employment. (That is why you don't get overtime.) Therefore anything that you do that could possibly relate to your employment is by default assumed to be a work for hire that took place during the course of your employment. There are admittedly some complications there. If a programmer writes a novel, that's going to not be a work for hire. If a programmer writes a program, that's likely going to be a work for hire. But there are gray areas. For instance a VB programmer by day who works a C device driver for Linux by night might have a case that their side project doesn't relate to their employment.

But just in case, virtually every New York company makes sure that employees sign contracts that clarifies any possible ambiguity..in favor of the employer. So the reality is that if you live in New York, you can't assume that you own your side project.

Incidentally this is the reason that the FSF (which is very careful on intellectual property) requires that they get copyright assignment both from contributers and from the contributers' employers. Because they don't want to get into a situation where they think they have copyright, but someone else has a legal claim to copyright that code.

And when he waived all gifts and NDA access, he got his MVP status back.

> When they inform you of these clauses, regardless of what the state law says, they are warning you they intend to create legal problems for you if you ever try to work for anyone else.

That sort of thing used to be called barratry, and it was illegal in a lot of jurisdictions (indeed, a felony in at least one state in the US).

It's also worth pointing out that this kind of abuse is less of a threat in jurisdictions that don't default to everyone paying their own fees. The behaviour seems particularly common to the US, where to an outsider the legal system can seem obviously flawed in this respect.

In any case, the advice to just not work for organisations that try to pull this kind of crap is sound. Even if this particular case doesn't apply, it's a good bet that they will try to screw you in other ways if this "we own your life" mindset is dominant in management/HR/legal at corporate level.

I once worked for a company here in the UK that got taken over by a US company, and one of the first things they tried to do was rewrite the contract so this sort of silly stuff was in it. To cut a long story short, I don't know what happened to the HR people who were originally responsible for the handover, because we never saw them again, but most of the original staff from the acquired company did stay and everyone had exactly the original IP clauses back in the contracts by the time we'd finished collectively re-educating the new owners about how much of our lives they were going to own.

A recent relevant discussion on reddit:

http://www.reddit.com/r/WTF/comments/fftaa/my_25_hour_foray_...