It's crazy that the "using X company equipment" legal basis works at all in those disputes.
Most of the time, "equipment" seems to mean "laptop". IHMO when "equipment" is such a commodity as a laptop, this should never even be an issue.
That's like a newspaper that would claims the work of one of it's journalist who is writing books on his personal time on the basis that the book was written with a pencil he brought home from work.
This. People need to understand that this isn't a McDonalds and it isn't an issue of making your own fries in the company oil. It's about "did I get my work done" and anything beyond that should be my own business.
But this is the way people think, and the way things are, so I assume that anything I make on company hardware or on company premises or while daydreaming about work or while wearing my company logo tshirt is the property of my employer, and I should probably consult them before selling or open-sourcing it...
The context of equipment here is (or should be) "all the expensive equipment in the lab that the employee couldn't possibly outfit themselves with." As you say, a generic laptop is awful close to being a pen and paper these days.
That said, if this sort of thing is a potential issue for you, you're probably better off using a purely personal laptop or desktop that isn't used for work purposes at all.
> That said, if this sort of thing is a potential issue for you, you're probably better off using a purely personal laptop or desktop that isn't used for work purposes at all.
I got a similar clause, and this is indeed what I do. I think it's fair that they get copyright when they provide the software/hardware. It's also simple for me to avoid that, I just use my home computer with my own Windows license (or Linux) for any side projects.
I rejected the previous job offer due to a more general copyright claim to all my ideas ever. The current one only has the "using company equipment".
>The current one only has the "using company equipment".
In that case, it makes a lot of sense just to keep the two domains separate. The flip side of a laptop being a relatively inexpensive piece of semi-commoditized gear if that, if there's a good reason to have a separate computer for personal projects, it's not really a big deal to do so.
This is most easily resolved by simply not using a company laptop at any time.
One of the first pieces of advice I got when I joined a big tech company for the first time was to just put the work provided laptop back in it's original box and get my own.
This turns out to be pretty good from a number of angles-- you get an emergency spare plus any kind of crazy bloat ware your job needs you already have a sacrificial host to load it on.
You're just doing work on your personal laptop? That doesn't mean you own the work you produce so I think it would complicate ownership of the non-work you produce. Best to use the work laptop for work and the personal laptop for personal stuff both for IP and company policy reasons.
Of course not, it does however eliminate a host of problems resulting from using company equipment including additional complications from efforts you would otherwise own except for using company equipment, or the extraordinarly reduced right to privacy you have on company equipment.
Using separate equipment is also good, but isn't always realistic particularly if your work requires frequent travel.
Obviously this only works out if your employer is okay with you using your own system for work. Years ago almost all were, and I believe today outside of few industries it's still commonly fine.
I would be very surprised if the company didnt want control over the machine, even from a securoty point of view, the idea of using your own hardward for your job is just a red flag.
Don't do it. Also, dont use anything related to work for anything other than work.. It's a tool for the job. Leave it at that.
>the idea of using your own hardward for your job is just a red flag.
It's also extremely common. How many people these days carry separate work and personal phones, for example? (Some do, of course, but I'm pretty sure they're the exceptions.) And, especially anyone who travels a lot probably uses one laptop a lot of the time too.
Is this "best practice"? Probably not. But it's convenient and it's usually not an issue. (Though I fully agree that, if you know something is a potentially borderline issue, it makes sense to wall personal and work off more completely.)
I can see the argument that your personal laptop contained everything related to your work, software, logins, ect, so the conclusion could easily be that everything done there could reasonably be expected to use company equipment and resources.
Some of the side projects he worked on prior to joining Google.
>Like many Googlers, I had projects I worked on in my spare time. Some of those I carried over from before joining.
>When I joined, I submitted two projects that I was actively working on at the time, largely just maintaining: AsbestOS (yes, those were the PS3 Linux days) and usbmuxd (iPhone USB comms daemon, you probably have it if you have Ubuntu!).
They also said it wasn't during work hours or on googles equipment.
Though, honestly, I doubt I really even agree on the equipment clause when it. When said equipment is a laptop and a phone, using their device would be more about not wanting to carry multiple devices than any interstice value gained by the equipment.
I think this restriction makes more sense in other industries, such as pharmaceuticals, where lab equipment can cost millions of dollars, so employee doing their own "side projects" on it is more real abuse of company property.
I'd typically agree, there is a solid argument there and the premise as a whole makes sense, I just think trivialities should be excluded, and that standard software development is fairly trivial use.
Once you test such software against company owned datasets, it's a different ballgame.
Most of the time, "equipment" seems to mean "laptop". IHMO when "equipment" is such a commodity as a laptop, this should never even be an issue.
That's like a newspaper that would claims the work of one of it's journalist who is writing books on his personal time on the basis that the book was written with a pencil he brought home from work.