91–100 of 186 posts
From Thomas Edison to Steve Jobs, the individual inventor is a hero in our popular imagination Am I reading this incorrectly? Are they promoting the idea that Steve Jobs is an individual inventor?
He definitely wasn't. And more importantly, neither was Edison.
While he didn't invent all that stuff himself, it's not like he had nothing to do with any of it.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I dislike it (and most forward-thinking companies wouldn't risk scaring off people who are the type that work on their own time), however I can see the reasons. How do they know you did it at home, not during work hours? How do they know it didn't affect your work? If you're salaried, there aren't set start/stop times. How do they know they weren't paying you at the time you came up with the idea, or thought through…
Maybe your boss is paid to have some clues about how you spend your time at work? Concerning the property of the tooling: if I bring my personal stapler to work, it's enough to taint everything I staple as my own property? how do we decide the property of the company paper I stapled with my staples? You can say it's reputed being the company property because you're on work time in company premises, but the whole prin…
Maybe don't sign these types of contracts? We are fortunate enough that even the most mediocre among us can hold out for the next employer that doesn't demand this kind of control over you, or start your own company. I don't give a shit what a company says about their culture of work/life balance or whatever. If I see blanket IP clauses unrelated to non-compete, or like arbitration clauses that remove us from civil c…
If I pay for a car, I'm paying for a product. If I pay someone to clean my garden, I'm buying his time, expertise etc. for the time to clean my garden. I look at me being paid at work the same way. I'm paid to work for 'n' hrs a day, 'm' days a week per year for cost 'x'. I provide you service and I get paid in return. What I do after work, as long as I don't infringe on any IP from work, is my business.
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I basically did whistle my way out the door because of this. I worked as a contractor for a very large defense company. After a year, they offered me full time employment. I specifically asked if there was a "we own everything you make" clause in the employment agreement, but I was assured there was not. I went through about five digital form contracts, and when I got to the last one, it had the clause in there. I to…
If you had a written promise, could you sue?
Unlike in credit situations there is no equivalent of the Fair Credit Act covering employment contracts. Many employers exploit that by writing some very crafty wording which reads one way but on close inspection says the opposite.
Oddly, I was thinking about this exact topic this weekend. When I joined my current company, I signed a document saying whatever I build belongs to the company. I'd like to go back and have this reversed. What is the best course of action? Write a letter saying that what I create on my own time is my property, and have the CEO or HR Manager sign it?
Get a carve-out agreed. You should be able to reasonably work that out by indicating you're working on X, in your own time, on your own equipment. X belongs to you and not the company. X is not in competition with the company.
Most places will grant that with little fuss.
If part of your job is to create ideas within some domain, and you can't control exactly when said ideas will crystallize, should it matter whether you 'got' an idea whilst 'at work' rather than in the shower, or on the way to work? The line is difficult to draw precisely with legal language, so companies err on the side which protects them best (hoping employees will sign anyway, given they've already gone through t…
The bigger problem is not the ideas that relate to your every day job... But Say your a Aerospace Engineer working on rockets and on your off time you write a scifi book, after your done you take it to a publisher, they publish it, and then your employer claims ownership over that book... and sues you That type of shit happens all the time, and while that is an extreme example, there are all kinds of examples like a…
My startup is compensating the engineers with restricted shares in the corporation. When we go for funding, we will want the highest valuation we can convince the investors of. One important valuation attribute is the corporation's legal ownership of the intellectual property produced by the engineers who build the system. That intellectual property is not just patents, but the source code, web site design, system ar…
Important acquisitions can be sunk because of a failure to adequately cover IP. In that case, sloppy paperwork can mean a very real loss to many people who have worked hard. From that point of view, it's far more important for an employer to cover it well and explain why.
It only takes the employment of one single contractor through odesk that wasn't signed up properly to jeopardise an important deal. Employees signing up for that need to understand why this is important.
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Strong work. Not everyone has the will, nor the financial wherewithal, to do such a thing.
>Not everyone has the will... to do such a thing. This may just be crotchety old man talk, but sometimes I wonder if the extremely protective child-rearing (particularly in schools) that seems to be abundant today will make future adults particularly susceptible to this kind of bullying. If you never have to deal with this kind of social stress as a child, how can you possibly deal with it as an adult? Perhaps gettin…
I've always been particularly confused by the contract clauses which specify that all work of the employee during their time at the company is property of the company itself. Does this mean that if I develop some completely unrelated software in my spare time while working as a programmer at a large company, that the software I created at home also belongs to my employer? What if I was to write a book during that sam…
Its sort of like 'copyleft' except it sucks into Google anything you touch, and use at least once at work.
And always be dubious when the company lawyer says, "Well that is what it says but that isn't what is meant by that clause." Because in a court of law, what it says counts.
* When I need to work on something, I think of the library I wish existed to get it done. Anything I need that is employer-specific should be configurable
* I make the library and release it with an MIT license
* I then use that library to accomplish my goal
This has the benefit of usually making me write better software. And it motivates me to make the open code better quality and better documented. This means the work is more valuable even to my colleagues that also eventually need to work with it.