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

De-mod

[Squirrel Killer]

I'm a moderation tester. And yes, I was testing to see how many moderators read the actualy story content before rating comments.

Bad me...punish me. Unfortunately, the story was /.ed. But the comment was insightful... Why does everyone have to be such an ass and try to prove /. wrong? It's a web site, you want to test moderation? How about testing how to get a life?

-sk

Then man will *never* be free...

[leonbrooks]

Man will never be free until the last king is strangled with the entrails of the last priest - Cactus Ed Abbey

In the society you dream of, it would have been necessary for the king and priest to also be free. The fact that at least one of them needs to be murdered (the priest may have died of natural causes, although the implication is `not') is a demonstration that Mr Abbey's society (and so a man in it) is not free.

Your next problem is that in a conceptually free society, no individual could have any more authority than any other, except that other grant it to him. So if I decide that ripping people's entrails out is a fine thing, and start with you, you have no more authority to decide that this is wrong, than I have that this is right. In theory an impasse, in practice might-makes-right, the stronger individual or team gets to carry out their will.

The missing ingredient is an incorruptible lawmaker with power to enforce. It's ironic that in order to be free, you must be in someone else's power... of course, most people won't settle for this, reason be damned, because the obvious candidate for the seat is God.