User: ekoffler

Judgement Summary

On: Does Your Employer Own Your Thoughts?

Well after reading the court's judgement the following paragraph seems to say a lot.

Brown also claims Alcatel was not in the business of designing software, but was in the telecommunications business. Thus, the employment agreement is not applicable to the Solution. However, the evidence in the record establishes that Brown managed the group at Alcatel charged with maintaining and developing automated conversion tools for converting high-level code to low- level code. The record further shows that one of Brown's job functions was to manually convert Alcatel's existing low-level code to high-level code. The evidence shows Alcatel twice investigated automated conversion tools in 1993 and 1995. In addition, in 1993, Brown managed the employee charged with investigating the low-level to high-level automated code conversion process and received a status report on his research on October 18, 1993.

We do not believe the court below erred in concluding Alcatel, pursuant to the employment agreement, "owns full legal right, title and interest to the process and/or method" that is known as the Solution. We overrule Brown's first issue in its entirety.

So it seems he did create something related to work and not just a game or php code during his off-time.