This reminds me of something that happened at a former employer. After I had been employed there for a couple of years, someone in HR or Legal noticed that the programmers had never signed any "our code belongs to the company" agreement. So they asked us to sign a paper to that effect, and gave us each a check for $20. My thought was that I always assumed the company owned this code, but if they were going to pay for…
Here's what I suspect happened: Any contract requires consideration. Without it, it's not a valid contract. It doesn't require fair consideration, so a clause giving e.g. $1 is typical for many contracts. They were nice and bumped it up to $20. I suspect your work DID belong to the company already, under work-for-hire doctrine, but an explicit contract avoids that ambiguity. Ambiguity can be bad and super-expensive,…
Last time I looked work-for-hire law only takes effect if there is explicit mention of the term "work-for-hire" in the contract, otherwise it's not "work-for-hire". And I have never seen a contract actually mention "work-for-hire".
Do current employment contracts state "work-for-hire"?