So does Netflix.
GitHub lets staff own IP developed for personal projects using company resources
151–160 of 484 posts
Re: GitHub lets staff own IP developed for personal projects using company resources
#152"But rather than negotiating a deal, Alcatel fired Brown and sued him for ownership of the idea. After a seven-year-long court battle, he lost and was forced to spend three months at the company’s offices, without pay, writing out the code to implement his solution." I deeply hate the judge who made this verdict. You must be truly devoid of human feeling and common sense to explain this as a reasonable application of…
It's morally bankrupt, but legally correct.
Why is he obligated to implement a solution? The IP is the idea, not the implementation of it.
Re: GitHub lets staff own IP developed for personal projects using company resources
#153I work at Wolfram Research (The company that makes Mathematica and Wolfram alpha). Our company also supports and encourages employees to work on personal projects. We are also allowed to responsibly use (not draining bandwidth running games all night or run bitcoin miners) office resources for personal projects.
This post is about the IP right to that work, not whether your company allows you to work on personal projects.
Re: GitHub lets staff own IP developed for personal projects using company resources
#154I work at a large law firm that represents a lot of software companies. Our standard employee agreement forms have the usual default (company owns everything you create with its resources or that relates to the scope of your employment). This default has always amused me because lawyers never sign these kinds of agreements with their own law firms . We spend most of our time writing contracts, memos, and other bits o…
Contracts theoretically could be protected by copyright. However, we reuse so much of the functional language that it would be difficult to prove that a given contract is sufficiently transformative to merit protection. One exception is that heavily-annotated firm templates and file memos. I would be more cautious about sharing a detailed, annotated template from a previous employer.
Some large firms in fact do require associates to sign covenants. In particular English firms seem to do this a lot. I consider it to be unethical, as it is anti-competitive and runs contrary to the interests of clients, who should remain free to select the lawyer of their choice (even a disloyal employee of their previous law firm).
Re: GitHub lets staff own IP developed for personal projects using company resources
#155I work at a fairly large independent game studio and there is a similar arrangement with the developers here. The studio has developed a framework of Unity extensions that aren't open source, but that the developers are free to use in their own side projects without having to cede any ownership back to the studio if/when their game is released. Even the fact that game developers are allowed to create other games outs…
That is excellent! It also has the nice benefit of keeping developers "on the island" by continuing to use, learn and extended in house libraries.
Re: GitHub lets staff own IP developed for personal projects using company resources
#156Earlier quoted context omitted.
For real. I am an indie game dev who recently released his first big game on Steam. Just a week or two ago I had a prospective company tell me that, in order to hire me, I would need to sell them the entirety of my personally-developed IP and dissolve my interest in my own company. Needless to say, I decided against that job.
You're not shameful enough to direct plug so I'll do it for you: http://soverance.com/ethereal/ Looks cool (fighting the "infected mushroom", ha).
*shameless
Re: GitHub lets staff own IP developed for personal projects using company resources
#157Earlier quoted context omitted.
Employment is lower risk. It's tougher to fire employees than contractors, so there's lower firing risk for employees. It also reduces your work overhead for stuff that HR can take care of for you (health insurance, life insurance, etc). As well as sick days. And at some places, this lets you focus on larger problems that you'd never get solved working from contract to contract.
> It's tougher to fire employees than contractors I keep reading this here, but this doesn't square with the reality I see all around me (this may be specific to the USA). I've observed plenty of people getting fired, sometimes on short notice and for non-obvious reasons, often only known to the employer and employee. As someone who does not run a business, could someone explain to me the details about exactly what m…
Not all states have at will employment.
Re: GitHub lets staff own IP developed for personal projects using company resources
#158I work at a large law firm that represents a lot of software companies. Our standard employee agreement forms have the usual default (company owns everything you create with its resources or that relates to the scope of your employment). This default has always amused me because lawyers never sign these kinds of agreements with their own law firms . We spend most of our time writing contracts, memos, and other bits o…
You are answering a big question of mine: "If I launch a PAAS product, am I allowed to copy Heroku's terms of use?". Seems like it's covered by copyright but it's IP-free zone, although "IANAL"...
On the other hand, it would be a headache if contracts were covered by copyright: If your competitor adds a clause to their contract, can you add the same clause if it's covered by copyright, or are you forever banned from adding this clause? Would someone file a patent on "Using contracts to limit the liability against customers", for example?
Re: GitHub lets staff own IP developed for personal projects using company resources
#159People keep complaining about how hard and expensive it is to attract top talent. This kind of measure is exactly how you do it. Provide an environment where employees feel trusted and empowered, pay market rate, screen properly instead of having applicants jump through hoops, and you won't have much trouble hiring. Kudos to github for this, I'm impressed!
For real. I am an indie game dev who recently released his first big game on Steam. Just a week or two ago I had a prospective company tell me that, in order to hire me, I would need to sell them the entirety of my personally-developed IP and dissolve my interest in my own company. Needless to say, I decided against that job.
You should write back to the developer contact on that interview and explain exactly why you're declining. They may assume you had other reasons for not moving forward. Bad actors have a habit of making their mistakes look like something else.
Re: GitHub lets staff own IP developed for personal projects using company resources
#160Earlier quoted context omitted.
For real. I am an indie game dev who recently released his first big game on Steam. Just a week or two ago I had a prospective company tell me that, in order to hire me, I would need to sell them the entirety of my personally-developed IP and dissolve my interest in my own company. Needless to say, I decided against that job.
Employment is dead, contract is the way of the future. Do you really want to buy into a feudalistic legacy organizational model knowing that the odds of rising up in the pyramid are approximately zero? And they're going to downsize with no loyalty if needed to bump the stock price later on. Like a decapitated chicken the company will strut around a bit randomly canceling or creating projects so you have no control ov…
Apparently lots of downvotes here but most companies will screw you over as soon as it's convenient for them to do so.