| >No-one (at least I don't think anyone) is suggesting that knowledge, experience and skills belong to your employer. That's the whole argument. There's literally no other argument. There is no separation between "previous body of work" and "experience, skills, or knowledge." I think you missed the, "Prince had to change his name to Artist formerly known as prince just so he could continue making music," analogy. That's exactly what's going on here. >But if I'm a video game developer, and I invent a new shading technique for video game graphics while I'm employed at BigGameCo (whether at home or at work)... If you're a pioneer in shaders, it's because you've spent years of time and effort trying to understand the problems associated with this one specialized field. You are going to continue being a pioneer in shaders long after you leave your current employer, because that's where you are the most competitive, because that's where all of your knowledge, experience and skills are. To change fields now would be career suicide. You would no longer be a specialist. Your years of knowledge and experience in shaders would lose all value if you decided to dig ditches/whatever alt line of work you go into, and that's what these contracts are forcing you to do: brave a job market where you have no advantage for your time spent at your previous company. Under these types of contracts, you're not allowed to move forward with your career trajectory after leaving a company. You would be building off your previous work that you did with them, and you're approaching problems with the same solutions you already came up with. That means your old employer owns the rights to all of your subsequent work. Same thing happens to musicians. Since every song they write is an iteration of their previous body of work, if musicians try to leave their record label and can be sued for the rights to every subsequent song they write. Prince had this happen and changed his name to "Artist formerly known as prince." to skirt around the contract. Ridiculous solution to a ridiculous problem. At the time I just thought Prince was being crazy. Apparently not. I'm also not talking about what types of contracts have been enforced in the past, obviously these companies keep trying to use these contracts because there is precedent, but there's precedent for fucking everything in this country and I could write a historiography of court-ordered fuckery if need be. What im trying to say is that these types of contracts have been thrown out in the past for being unreasonable, and should all be thrown out in the future. This was not the intended spirit of any law allowing people to own "intellectual property." |