[Terr_]

> But for the duration of your employment, all your ideas belong to them.

Only in certain states, and I only if you sign such a contract. Did the author actually read his contract and say: "Please remove this part"?

I know California and Washington both have state laws limiting what companies can do in terms of taking ownership of your "outside" work.

[jofer]

Good luck getting a company or "remove this part" of a contract. I've always been told very clearly and angrily that that was not up for discussion.

My current employer technically forbids me from showing photographs of my dog to my mom. Naturally, no one would ever care if I did, but my contract explicitly considers any distribution of anything I produce that can be copyrighted (at work or not) an act corporate espionage.

[Frondo]

Just by way of giving a different experience, I've had that clause stricken from 100% of employment contracts I've ever signed.

[exratione]

I've carried out that alteration/redlining in every tech work contract I've signed. It has never been a blocking issue, and it is usually the case that the people handling the details of hiring are unaware of the details of the clauses in the contract - they just take what the lawyers hand over as boilerplate.

https://www.exratione.com/2011/11/the-miserable-state-of-int...

[ska]

I have had success redlining a contract with similar terms, it certainly isn't unheard of.

[jofer]

To be fair, I've mostly worked for very large companies.

In large corporations, an exception to a blanket IP contract would require approval by fairly high ranking people in both HR and Legal. When you have >10,000 employees, individual exceptions simply don't happen for anyone under any circumstances.

My experience is only reflective of very large companies. I doubt it's representative of smaller employers.

[nitrogen]

Are you being paid well enough by this bigcorp that it's worth losing the ability to comment on HN without violating the letter of your agreement (since comments are copyrighted by their authors by default)?

[brandall10]

That sounds about right.

My last employer was a startup and I had this stricken... as well had privisions in place so I could do outside consulting as long as it wasn't in a competitive industry (this they may have given me as I came to them initially doing part-time consulting).

The place I worked at before, a 15k person corp, is a place I wouldn't have even thought of asking for things like that. It would have a couple weeks just to have gotten a turnaround through HR and legal.

[ska]

That's true. And of course large companies will work through modifications to your contract too, but only for a handful of those 10,000+ employees.

[johnward]

A lot of us work oustside of those areas. In my case we got acquired. My choice was to keep steady employement or become unemployed for some unknown time. I took the risk and signed. Then things like this happen:http://www.goodwinprocter.com/News/Press-Releases/2011/Court...

[brazzledazzle]

Since that was written by the law firm representing IBM it's probably the most charitable interpretation you're going to get and I'm still disgusted by it.

[astazangasta]

Everyone involved in that story sounds like a terrible person. Some day very soon, I hope, the notion that an individual can own an idea and control its usage will be regarded as despicable. What an evil thought.

[cbhl]

I've definitely had prospective employers say "no, we will not remove that part, because we've been burned by bad employees before".

[graeham]

How does one tell if an idea was 'discovered' during office hours or not? The system fails if only 'bad' ideas belong to your employer.

Most contracts I've come across don't define working hours versus not.