Worrying About Employment Contracts?

An anonymous reader wonders: "I was preparing to accept a software developer job at a California company and was put off by the contract which claimed ownership of any ideas I create (on my own time or at the company) during my stay at the company and required me to inform them of any ideas (related to the company or not) during my employment and for a year afterwards. I've found references to a couple of instances where this became a legal problem for the developer. Is this something to worry about?"

Comments

I turned this around once.

[marcus]

I was once handed a contract with a particularly abusive set of IP stipulations. Basically I swapped out all the references to employee and employer so that it said I would own the IP of all inventions of the company whether or not they were invented while I was at work, etc. and handed it back. He didn't flinch. He just looked at me sort of funny and took out the whole paragraph.

Ended up not working for that company, but that was because I'd gotten a better offer elsewhere.