Ask YC: How to ensure the rights to a side project are retained when working a full time job?

[riffplay]

I am planning to start a site with a few friends while working full time at another job. The site we're building is unrelated to the field I work in during the day. I want to be certain I retain all rights to the site and it's content, but I have heard that when holding a full time job your employer may have rights to your work, even when done on your own equipment during evenings and weekends. Does anyone have a recommendation for how to go about ensuring you retain all rights to work done on your own time? Thanks.

[run4yourlives]

1. Have you signed anything regarding IP? Review it.

2. If no, don't worry about it, just don't use anything from the company, including time and domain knowledge.

3. If it's completely non-competitive, and you have the right environment, you may be able to put something pro-dev into writing.

4. Move to Canada, where courts have consistently ruled against these asinine laws.

[chaostheory]

(I'm not a lawyer and this is not advice. This is based mainly on a former co-worker's experience; his wife happened to be a contract lawyer.)

A lot of engineers seem to forget the IP agreement that they signed when they joined. Typical ones essentially say that any idea you come up with even in your sleep outside of work is owned by your employer...

If you want to keep your job and still do something, depending on the state you live in, you can do something. When your IP employment contract needs to be renewed or signed, bring the contract to a contract / employment lawyer. They can make ammendments to it that are more fair (eg. if the idea is not related to your company's industry and its done outside of company time and resources - it's yours). Again you should probably talk to a lawyer.

btw what state do you live/work in? if it's cali, you may have a little more leverage. if in the south east (and Texas), probably less...

[m0nty]

www.novacaster.com is a CMS I coded from scratch in Perl, in 1999-2000. I was told by my boss it would be released as open source, but that never happened. When I left the job, he told me he would be "retaining full rights to the Novacaster CMS code", etc, and there was basically nothing I could do about it. I'd recommend getting a lawyer involved, although even that means nothing if you don't have the funds to fight a court case.

More recently, my strategy has been to say nothing to employers about side projects. Assign the rights to your friends, if you have to, just in case they do find out.