[clucas]

There are things that you can't contract away.

An obvious example in the U.S. is that even if you have a contract saying you have to work for someone for no pay, forever, with no possibility of getting out the contract, it would be unenforceable because we, as a nation, have decided that slavery should not be legal.

It turns out, many of these un-contractable issues involve the employer/employee relationship... another example: even if you sign a contract saying your employer doesn't have to pay you overtime, that provision would be thrown out if you challenged it, and would probably get the employer in trouble with various agencies, including the IRS.

I am a lawyer, but I don't have experience in this field, and this is not legal advice (you have to hire me for that), but this issue seems like one that a court (depending on the state, no doubt) would find that it doesn't matter what the contract says, an employer can't own everything an employee does.

To emphasize: this is NOT legal advice, don't rely on it, and you really should seek counsel if you are encountering this issue in real life.

[umanwizard]

Sure, plenty of stuff is unenforceable in contracts. Is there any evidence that this particular sort of extremely common clause is in that set?

[clucas]

The fact that the employer/employee relationship is so carefully controlled (specifically to limit the power the employer wields over the employee outside employment) is what makes me suspect that at least some jurisdictions would decline to enforce an employment contract provision that gave the employer ownership over all IP the employee produces, even if the IP is produced off-hours, without use of the employer's equipment, and not having any relationship to the employer's business.

Again, I don't actually know for sure - I'm not an expert in this area of law. But I think there is enough evidence in the rest of (U.S.) employment law jurisprudence to indicate that it's not open-and-shut in favor of the employer.

[goatherders]

At issue is he says that what he created is within the realm/market of his employer. That would be akin to an Intel engineer saying "I designed another microchip for computers but I promise I was doing this for me and not for Intel so its mine." You cant do some work on specific sector A for your employer and then do some other work in specific sector A on your own and now expect the employer to ask, justifiably, "who decided the dividing line here?"

[clucas]

My apologies, I was responding to the question about why a court would find an employment contract provision unenforceable - we don't know what the OP's employment contract states (or if he even has one), so I was treating this whole line of inquiry as separate from the OP's situation. Didn't mean to confuse the issues.