>But that they owned ownership for every line of code written by me, even on my time off, was killing my inspiration. Where were you working? That's definitely not how US ip-law operates.
That is OFTEN how US employment contracts work though... Perhaps not in CA, but the rest of the US... Every employment contract I've been asked to sign has had some level of owning stuff I do off-hours (up to everything you do any time on your own computers, everything you've done in the past, etc...). I've always pushed back and gotten it changed to meet my needs.
Same here, I've gotten it stipulated that only things related to the business were to be their property. Nobody's complained.
I give employers/customers a copy of all my pre-existing open-source or private work on a DVD and have them sign a document stating "This code/IP existed before our work agreement and have no claim to any of it, now or in the future, including derivative works." They sign it before I sign any contract of theirs.
This can be hard to demand from larger droid-run companies. The more entrepreneurial businesses understand: they want solutions to immediate problems, and don't care about collecting vague legal hammers that are only useful in the future.
This shows the shitty policy that most companies have. They use open source internally and give nothing back.
Yeah, I have been working for Rails shop that did exactly this. I wasn't able to do anything, not even in my spare time, to contribute to open-source projects or do other work. The other work I can understand, because I could help a competitor for an example. But that they owned ownership for every line of code written by me, even on my time off, was killing my inspiration.
I have never worked for a company that gave anything back to the open source community.
Newspapers, commercial kitchens, design studios. All of them used open source software like PHP, jQuery, etc.
I developed a lot of jQuery plugins that will never see the light of day.
This is only true for graduate programs where the school is paying for your tuition via a research or teaching assistanceship. For undergraduates, who traditionally pay for their own tuition, or for graduate students under scholarship, they own all of their own work.
>For undergraduates, who traditionally pay for their own tuition, or for graduate students under scholarship, they own all of their own work. This depends on what the work's being done for. If it's for a class or a credit giving research project, the university usually does own the IP in most cases. However, if it's a side project that's not using any of the university's resources, the university shouldn't have any r…
Where I have been (in the US), work done for a course is always owned by the person who is paying for the course, which in the case of an undergraduate paying their own tuition, is the student.
Basically, the person paying owns the work. If you pay, then you own it.
My university owns anything you make while you are a student there. The example they used was something along the lines of: if you worked on it only in your dorm room and it had nothing to do with the university and received zero university funding, it was still theirs and you couldn't ever file a patent on it.
Your current university? Please do paste the relevant passages where this ownership is specified. Inquiring minds want to know!
University of Kentucky claims rights to almost anything (even "drawings") students make while in any of "certain University units" (including the "Computing Center"):
http://www.adec.edu/intellectualproperty/uky.html
It's not clear whether a dorm room is one of those "certain University units" or not. I don't think so, but it'd depend on the phrasing of the dorm room mission statement.
Your current university? Please do paste the relevant passages where this ownership is specified. Inquiring minds want to know!
There are several links to University IP policies here: http://www.adec.edu/user/ip-policies.html Most of them exempt things made on your own time. University of Kentucky claims rights to almost anything (even "drawings") students make while in any of "certain University units" (including the "Computing Center"): http://www.adec.edu/intellectualproperty/uky.html It's not clear whether a dorm room is one of those "cer…
Ooh, my new favorite is North Carolina A&T State University:
"We don't have any such policies in place at this time. The university has initiated a faculty interest group which meets regularly to discuss these issues and similiar DL opportunities. Some interesting things are coming out these discussions."
Strange that all the charts shown are the worthless kind. Time series, pie-style, all are the lowest common denominator of graphic information. No scatterplot, no multivariate analysis of any kind.
Yesterday we saw Hans Rosling show the developing world's progress in 30 seconds of brilliant graphics. Today: pie charts.
In Australia, I worked for a company that had what amounted to a "we own all your brainz" clause in their contract. I queried it, and they modified it: they owned anything I produced using their hardware, during paid time (excluding lunch breaks) or using knowledge I'd gained directly from working for them. Everything else, even stuff I did in the lunchroom using my laptop, was mine. The boss's son apparently agreed…
> or using knowledge I'd gained directly from working for them I wouldn't be comfortable with that. If you have gained knowledge on Redis, you should be able to use Redis in a personal project. It would be different if you had developed a super secret ranking algorithm that you later re-implemented in another project.
They made it clear (I don't recall the wording) that knowledge I gained for myself while working -- from co-workers, from research done as a necessary part of solving problems, etc -- wasn't the issue; it was specifically knowledge about the business and the topic it covers, which was related to the medical field, rather than knowledge of computer-specific issues. So: software projects relying on my knowledge of XSLT gleaned from working there: fine, not a problem; software projects to prescribe warfarin safely: not so fine. This was a good balance, and I had no trouble with it.