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Dealing With an Overly-Restrictive Intellectual Property Policy?
An anonymous reader writes "I am very happy with my current job, but there have always been a few ideas for things I've wanted to develop on the side. Ideally I'd keep my day job, reserving mornings, evenings and weekends to see if the side-projects could become viable. The problem is: my employer has an IP policy that states that anything I do while under their employ is theirs, even when I'm off the clock. Does anyone have suggestions about workarounds, magic loopholes, false identity for the side projects? Anything?"
What I did at my current (academic) job is to keep copyright with my employer, but have them license it back to me under GPL. This means that if I move jobs or start my own business I can keep working on these projects. You can sell it to them as showing how they (ie, you) contribute to the community etc, and that they keep all IP so there is no danger of you suing them and they can always relicense.
Downside is of course that your future business model would have to build around an OSS core, but there are various options (OSS backend with proprietary frontend, web business / software as a service (no distribution = no requirement to give source code), proprietary modules that actually make it work (but make sure that the proprietary part cannot be construed as a derived work), etc etc.
When the company has a blanket policy that takes the employee's inventions, it can come to bite them in the ass.
When I was illegally fired by Microsystems, Inc. ("MSI") they took possession of work I did on my own time using my own tools. However, on the workers comp. claim their denial was based on the claim the tendinitis was caused in part by my work at home. Either MSI fraudulently denied the workers comp. claim, or committed fraud by asserting and taking possession of the work I did on my own time.
By having a blanket policy of owning everything you do, the employer could be on the hook for everything you do.
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I am in my 50s, and when I was in my 20s things were different. Back then it was customary that one's inventions were one's own unless they were created during the work day as part of one's job.
What has changed is that corporate lawyers have instituted employee agreements that are much more severe - absurdly so.
One should not be willing to sign an agreement that gives an employer rights to anything you think of during the term of your employment. Your job is not your whole life. Employment is not indentured servitude.
I myself never sign such an agreement. It often becomes a difficult issue, but I just don't sign, and I have never been fired because of it. One thing I have often done is modify the agreement, crossing out the phrase "in the course of" and replacing it with "pursuant to" where they specify that they own IP that is created "in the course of" my work. These two phrases mean very different things.
Nowadays, I usually do my work as 1099 for this reason, since expectations with respect to IP are different. Employers think that they "own" anyone who is a W-2.