Beware Employment Contracts

elfdump writes "Tilly, one of the Perl Monks, has been threatened with lawsuits from his employer for performing open-source development. His company claims ownership on all of the GPL'd work he has performed since he was hired, including rights to portions of the Carp and Exporter modules. In addition to his code being pulled, Tilly's revolutionary ideas on regular expression engines (1, 2) may now never be fulfilled. In this statement, Tilly warns open-source developers of the dangers of the "work for hire" provision in contracts, which entitles a company to all of its employee's intellectual products, regardless of their applicability to the company or whether or not the ideas were developed on work time. Definitely something to consider if you perform OSS development." One thing to clarify: your employer does not own everything you do by law - only by the contract you may have signed. Brief rant below.

A lot of people think they have no negotiating ability. You do. When you're thinking of signing on with some company, and they send you a boiler-plate contract to sign, don't just sign it and send it back. Read it carefully. Alter it as you see fit, striking out sections, adding sections, and initialing each change. Then sign it, make a copy for yourself, and send it back.

Where it says:

company owns the rights to all work produced during the term of employment

Just strike it out, and change it to:

company owns the rights to code written during working hours and in direct furtherance of any tasks assigned by the company

See how much nicer that reads? Now, when you do this, there are two possibilities: either the company will ignore it and hire you, or they will object to your alteration of the contract. In the second case, if they stand firm on the boiler-plate contract, I suggest you simply ask for more money - for instance, if you were expecting an 8 hour/day job and their contract asserts that they own what you do 24 hours/day, then you'll need at least three times as much salary to compensate.

And if you and the company cannot reach an agreement, well, maybe you didn't want to work for them anyway. If they're already screwing you before you've even signed on, that's not a good omen.

There's already some good advice in the comments on the perlmonks story, so I'll leave it at that.

Comments

I would like to know the name of the company.

[Sivar]

No reason. }:>

You don't own your rant

[Disco Stu]

Dude, I think your employer owns your Perlmonks rant, too. I hope they don't change it.

If you hate your job anyways...

[dghcasp]

Some places I worked in the past had Employment Contracts that gave the company full rights to "... any intellectual property, inventions or creations made during the period of employment." [wording more or less.]

I often thought that if I really wanted to quit and didn't care about a good reference, I'd take my camera to the local zoo and shoot several rolls of, er..., animal droppings, then lay out a book of photos of these, er... products of nature. And, since the company has all IP rights, put them down as the author.

It'd all be worth it when HR got the pre-press of the glossy coffe table book of Products, by Joe's Software, with the big picture of a turd on the cover.

Re:Scary

[Zurk]

yup. join the club of people who release GPL software anonymously.
although in my case it was a fear of being sued for reverse engineering stuff from multiple companies.

Re:or in Washington

[Supa Mentat]

Dude, you admitted to working for M$ on /. and made no excuses for it! How do you walk with balls that big?

Re:Argh..

[DEBEDb]

On the other hand, feel free to create
a very controversial work that your employer
will have the rights to. A porn movie,
perhaps.

Re:Read your contracts

[the grace of R'hllor]

Section 14
1)
The boss' firstborn daughter, on her 18th birthday, shall be delivered to me while in a cake and wearing a teddy.
2)
[more of the same]