[franksvalli]

I'm not a lawyer. In my brief time there years back in the US, there was a training course that somewhat touched on this. Essentially the takeaway was that what you developed on your own time and equipment was a bit of a grey area, but likely problematic if what you were building was something that would compete with Google in some way. Since Google owns so much tech in so many spaces, the general argument was that whatever software you were writing on your own time was likely something that could be seen as competing with Google, therefore you'd be better to just avoid it altogether.

I'm not sure if the same argument can be made for non-code manuscripts.