[danssig]

Personally I would just ignore it. If your company owns what you do on their time and off their time that would mean you're a slave. Since slavery is almost certainly illegal where you live, I'd say you're pretty safe.

They might be able to give you some grief if you're doing the exact same thing at home as you're doing at work, but even then I doubt they could enforce anything. Didn't Zuckerberg sign some agreements about copying not copying work?

Of course, if they hear about your commercial project(s) they could fire you for it, but if they'll fire you for something like that they were probably looking for a reason anyway.

[twinn]

If I ignore it and my side project takes off they'd have claim to the copyright. Sounds like a huge legal mess.

[danssig]

They have no copyright claim to anything you do in your free time. What possible legal precedent could there be for some company you happen to work for to own everything you produce in your personal time? Does that sound realistic to you? If you worked for a house building company and added on to your house would you have to pay them?

You can not sign away your rights. If you sign a document that said your company can just kill you, they still wouldn't have any right to kill you.

I'd like to see a citation of anyone making something in their free time that a company was able to steal from them based on some work contract. And if someone can find citations that it does indeed work this way where you live, don't just quit. Move away from what ever insane place you live that allows this kind of literal slavery.

[joshvc]

There's plenty of legal precedent for this kind of thing in Non-Compete and Non-Disclosure laws, especially in creative industries. I don't have a concrete example (sorry), but I know that places like Disney have them. A Disney employee can't sit around thinking up scripts and selling them on his own- Disney will claim that they own whatever creative output he has while working for them.

The question here is how common it is in twinn's industry and whether it seems ethical and worth putting up with. For a programmer to be barred from freelancing, consulting, or side-projects AT ALL is pretty extreme. But it's probably easier for his company to leave that in place instead of trying to define what is or is not competing with their product line.

[danssig]

Of course companies have Non-Compete/Non-Disclosure laws. There is no law (afaik) that says a company can't try to make you think they have more rights than they do. Have you ever heard of anyone trying to enforce one? The only one I've ever heard of was that high up executive who recently moved between two competing companies (think Oracle was one of the parties and maybe HP) and that was settled between the companies out of court. So I still no of no cases where it has been tested in court and was help up. Holding up such laws would be an insane precedent.

Look at it this way: when you sign these agreements are you on equal footing? If every company has them then you have no choice to but sign if you want to work. So you're not freely giving up your rights, you're basically being forced to.

[twinn]

Totally agree. The flip side is I've got a friend who as a company that has almost gone under just from the threat of a legal battle he can not afford to fight. Those things are time consuming and suck the life out of a person.