Slashdot Mirror
Non-Competes As the DRM of Human Capital
An anonymous reader writes "Techdirt has an interesting look at how non-compete agreements are like DRM for people, doing just as much damage to innovation as DRM has done to the entertainment industry. It includes links to a lot of research to back up the premise, including some studies showing that Silicon Valley's success as compared to Boston's can be traced in part to the fact that California does not enforce non-compete agreements."
And I'm in the process of trying to negotiate that BS line away in an employment
agreement I got presented.
There is no way I will sign an agreement of that nature without serious modifications.
I've walked away from contract gigs in recent times where the client's HR outsource
insisted that I couldn't start work without signing the document and that there would
be no modifications to the document (Effectively dismissing me before I even started-
the hiring manager went into a panic and went charging around to get permission to
get me to submit an amendment to the agreement that protected their interests, but
by that point in time, I'd already got another comparable contract and was off the
hook from the other. Don't play games with me. You wouldn't tolerate this stuff
out of me, I won't tolerate it out of you as an employer.
In the end, it's standard boilerplate and it's from businesses or their lawyers
thinking they're "clever" and trying to avoid losing anything that might be theirs.
The problem is, for me, it IS indentured servitude- and they're in no way even remotely
paying me enough to lay claim to everything I might come up with, nor could they.
The HR people all invariably say "that's not what we're intending"- BULLSHIT. If you
intended otherwise, you would have put it in the agreement- what is on the paper is
what you intended. If it's not, you need to fire your damn Counsel and find one that
will do what you actually intend.
I am not merely a "consumer" or a "taxpayer". I am a Citizen of the State of Texas
Yeah, because those stupid statisticians at Stanford etc. don't consider other variables when they do their statistical analysis
For example - from the article.
Gilson looks at a few of the other possible explanations for the difference and shows how they're all lacking, leaving the difference in noncompetes as being the key difference between the two regions in terms of the flow of information and ideas leading to new innovations.
You can even follow through and read the sources linked from the original article
eg.http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=124508
Why are people on the internet always so eager to think that highly qualified economists at world class Universities will have failed to consider the one blindingly obvious thing to consider about a situation, simply based on reading a one line summary of the relevant paper, in order to prove some clearly stupid point?