in reply to Re^2: What I am paid for
in thread What I am paid for

Right -- I didn't want to go off on a tangent and use up more bandwidth about this, but I have heard of Employment Contracts that basically say *anything* you write belongs to your employer. A classic tale about this is tilly's node Professional Employees and Works for Hire.

Alex / talexb / Toronto

Team website: Forex Chart Monkey, Forex Technical Analysis and Pickpocket Prevention

"Groklaw is the open-source mentality applied to legal research" ~ Linus Torvalds

Replies are listed 'Best First'.
Re^4: What I am paid for
by mscharrer (Hermit) on Mar 08, 2010 at 09:51 UTC
    Do you mean *anything* related to your professional work? Or does thing *anything* also covers completely unrelated own OOS projects of the employee?
[reply]
      Anything. 24/7. In some cases, it doesn't even matter if it's work-related. I've seen employment contracts in the US which, taken as written, mean that if you work as a programmer and, during an extended vacation, you design and patent a new style of hairbrush, your employer owns that patent.

      Now, whether those clauses are actually enforceable depends on what state you live in, but employers do routinely make such broad claims to any and all intellectual property developed by their employees, regardless of what it is or when it's created.

[reply]

In Section Meditations