[ma2rten]

That's not true. If you don't use any work resources and it doesn't compete with google, Google doesn't doesn't own it (at least in California).

The reason they have this progress is that google does so many things that almost anything could be considered competing with Google.

[saagarjha]

> doesn't compete with google

Alphabet has subsidiaries that work in medicine and autonomous vehicles. You sure your side project isn't competing with the company? You sure you can do so in court when the company comes after you with its top-notch legal team?

[stale2002]

> You sure you can do so in court when the company comes after you with its top-notch legal team?

Here is your mistake. The reality is, that they arent going to do that, the vast majority of the time.

The only time when it maybe might happen, is in far out there situations, such as, for example, when that self-driving car guy, built his own multi-hundred million dollar company, on the basis of stolen google documents.

And even then google only went after this guy, after he sold the company to Uber. Before that, google was perfectly fine with the guy running his mult-hundred million dollar company.

Are you going to create a multi-hundred million dollar company, on the basis of literal stolen documents? No? then you almost certainly don't have to worry about it. Nobody is coming after you.

[tombert]

Sadly that's not the case in NY, where I live. I've tried calling my representatives to see if they can propose it for a national law, but I suspect COVID has put this on the backburner.