Who Owns Your Weblog?

An anonymous reader asks: "If you're a weblogger, have you read the fine print of your employment agreement? Many webloggers are techies and many tech employers have highly restrictive IP clauses in their employment contracts - the employers owns you and everything you do whether at work or at home or anywhere else. Are you sure you own your weblog? You may not be allowed to take it with you when you change jobs." As always, please remember to look over those employment contracts before you sign. With that point mentioned however, are employers still likely to employ someone who is willing to argue points on their contract, especially in this economic climate?

Comments

Re:well

[stefanlasiewski]

Put another way, are you willing to sell out title to your potential future ventures for the "comfort" of short-term job security?

If you think it's about "comfort", you're probably not very familar with the dilemma.

For most people, it's not a matter of "comfort", it's a matter of "Getting a job after a year of unemployment", "Not having to sell the house", "Feed the kids", "Switching industries and starting at the bottom", "Working at McDonalds".

You make it seem like these these clauses are new. They've been in every employment contract I've seen for the last 8 years; and have been around for much, much longer then that.

Law?

[LarryRiedel]

I work in california.us, where we have laws about this kind of thing, for example:

2870. (a) Any provision in an employment agreement which provides
that an employee shall assign, or offer to assign, any of his or her
rights in an invention to his or her employer shall not apply to an
invention that the employee developed entirely on his or her own time
without using the employer's equipment, supplies, facilities, or
trade secret information except for those inventions that either:
(1) Relate at the time of conception or reduction to practice of
the invention to the employer's business, or actual or demonstrably
anticipated research or development of the employer; or
(2) Result from any work performed by the employee for the
employer.
(b) To the extent a provision in an employment agreement purports
to require an employee to assign an invention otherwise excluded from
being required to be assigned under subdivision (a), the provision
is against the public policy of this state and is unenforceable.

2871. No employer shall require a provision made void and
unenforceable by Section 2870 as a condition of employment or
continued employment. Nothing in this article shall be construed to
forbid or restrict the right of an employer to provide in contracts
of employment for disclosure, provided that any such disclosures be
received in confidence, of all of the employee's inventions made
solely or jointly with others during the term of his or her
employment, a review process by the employer to determine such issues
as may arise, and for full title to certain patents and inventions
to be in the United States, as required by contracts between the
employer and the United States or any of its agencies.

Larry

Experience With a Restrictive Employment Contract

[Babbster]

First off, I'm not a techie, so this won't apply to a great many people here. That being said, these kinds of agreements have popped up in a lot of places over the past decade or so even outside the tech professions.

My experience was at the American Red Cross. I was responsible for maintaining our local list of ineligible blood donors (positive infectious disease test results and the like). One day, everyone in the place was presented with a new "employment agreement" which we were supposed to sign. One of the provisions indicated just what is described in this story; specifically, anything I happened to create, invent, design, etc. - whether during work hours or not - belonged to the American Red Cross unless they decided to relinquish those rights. Now, I'm no kind of inventor but I was 23 years old with few responsibilities beyond myself and so I was the perfect person to protest this agreement on pure principle. I adamantly refused to sign the paper because I felt that it gave too much power over my life to my employer, not to mention the fact that a non-profit corporation specializing in disaster relief and blood collection/distribution shouldn't have an interest in anything that I create (assuming it has nothing to do with disaster relief, blood collection, etc.).

At first, I was told that if I didn't sign the paper I was risking the loss of my job. I maintained that this was a chance I was willing to take (and encouraged others to do the same). About a month later, the new employment agreement was revised into a more palatable format. Though I can't recall if it specified inventions/creations relating specifically to my employment or if the clause was taken out completely, the document was acceptable and I signed.

My advice is pretty simple: Check your state/local laws - as in a post above, an overly restrictive clause of this nature could be invalid on its face. If it IS valid, then you have to decide if a) you're willing (and financially able) to leave the job on principle to hopefully find one where you're not forced to sign such an odious document, b) you're going to create/design/invent something in which your company would want to claim an interest or c) you know you're not going to create something that you will want to sell (or release, a la open source) to which you could lose your rights. After all, while a company could theoretically lay claim to, for example, your David Hasselhoff fan site, they probably won't. On the other hand, if you create brand new database software in your free time while working for [any] software company, they could potentially strip it from you and from anyone else to whom you have given or sold it.

At the risk of going too long, remember too that Steve Wozniak worked for HP when he created the Apple computer. He offered it to them because as part of his contract he was required to do so. They had no interest at all, which I'm sure they regretted for a long time.

Re:News how...?

[gl4ss]

In most places such clauses carry no legal weight at all anyways, since you just can't sign some rights away(to avoid slavery&etc). Sure, the employer owns rights to stuff you do for them...