<caveat>
I'm in California, where the laws are fairly liberal in this regard, so YMMV.
<caveat>

If you run into an employement contract that includes a "prior inventions" disclosure, look it over very carefully. If it indeed protects you, use it!. Disclose, in broad language, ideas that you want to protect. Be only as specific as you need to be to avoid ambiguity.

If your employement contract doesn't include such a disclosure, negotiate one in.

To establish that an idea is yours, it might help (depending on the laws in your area) to keep a private "lab notebook" for personal work. But be very, very careful not to mix in non-private work. I rather suspect that the guy who ran into problems with someone else claiming his thinking had no documentation on his prior thinking.

In reply to Re: (OT) Professional Employees: who owns your thoughts? by dws
in thread (OT) Professional Employees: who owns your thoughts? by Ovid

Title:
Use:  <p> text here (a paragraph) </p>
and:  <code> code here </code>
to format your post, it's "PerlMonks-approved HTML":


  • Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!
  • Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.
  • Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.
  • Please read these before you post! —
  • Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:
    a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, details, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, summary, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr
  • You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)
            For:     Use:
    & &amp;
    < &lt;
    > &gt;
    [ &#91;
    ] &#93;
  • Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?
  • See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.