[iwhalen]

From the full letter[1]:

> Our Free Time is Our Own: Currently, if an employee makes anything creative in their free time, with their own resources, Hasbro may claim ownership. What we do in our free time should not be dictated by the company; neither should what we make in our free time be owned by the company.

How common is this in creative fields?

From my perspective this seems outlandish. Imagine doing FOSS work or a side project on your personal computer and your company tries to claim it. Odd...

[1]: https://unitedwizardsofthecoast.com/letter

[drob518]

Most employment agreements for tech companies have a clause that says that the employer owns everything you do while you’re working for them. And if you’re on salary, as opposed to working by the hour, there really is no “free time.” In practice no company is going to go after you for anything that is non-competitive, and doubly so if it’s also open source work. But yea, if you’re inventing competitive products in your “spare” time, companies could go after you.

[paulddraper]

The relevance isn’t wholly work hours but rather “work for hire,” I.e. if it’s in the scope of your paid responsibilities.

A handful of states including California disallow this condition.

[margalabargala]

Most? No. Many, sure.

> have a clause that says that the employer owns everything you do while you’re working for them

Good companies will have a clause that says the employer owns everything you do in the relevant field of the company while working for them, explicitly naming that field.

If you work for a logistics company, you would be able to write your own video editor without any worry. If you work for a not-shitty company.

[drob518]

I’ve worked at 12 companies in Silicon Valley and they all had variations of such language, whether huge Fortune 50 corporations or 4-person startups with the ink still wet on their incorporation filing. Yes, the better ones have a clause that restricts the claim to competitive work, but not all do. Smaller companies will be more flexible with you, particularly if you’re a key hire. At larger companies, it’s typically take it or leave it. HR has forms that must be signed and they sure aren’t going to involve the legal department for you. And to be clear, nobody is going to come after you for a completely orthogonal work product. There’s no point because they can’t monetize whatever orthogonal thing you created and it would cost them lawyers fees for no return. But I have seen companies try to enforce those contracts before. I have not ever seen one go to court. They typically settle before they get that far, but rumors were that IP was given to the company. The employee left in any case and redid the work outside.

[margalabargala]

> Yes, the better ones have a clause that restricts the claim to competitive work, but not all do.

Yeah, this is my whole point. The rest of your comment, I agree with. In practice you're unlikely to have an issue for something orthogonal and especially something financially worthless.

But you might. There are a lot of people out there that have predatory attitudes towards IP, especially among C-level or would-be-C-level.

And companies that restrict to competing IP do exist.

[drob518]

It’s certainly shifted toward restricting the scope to competing IP, but that’s only in the last 15 years or so. Prior to that it was definitely more all encompassing. But yea, companies are becoming more enlightened as key employees push back and the companies figure out that they don’t really want your orthogonal ideas anyway. But back in the day, particularly when many employees might only work for a maximum of three to five companies anyway, it was extremely common to have “we own everything you create” clauses.

[happyopossum]

> HR has forms that must be signed and they sure aren’t going to involve the legal department for you.

Three times in my career I've returned hiring agreements with redlines and never once had them questioned or countered.

[kevinmgranger]

Do you have any figures that show it's _most_? I sure hope not, but I wouldn't be surprised either.

[Bratmon]

Finding one that doesn't would be very hard.

[junon]

All of my employers have let me specify my personal projects are mine. Maybe I've been lucky but I wouldn't work at a place that doesn't allow me my own life.

[kimixa]

This is also something I try to ask for - generally I get the "that's fine" from the hiring manager and HR, but both times I've then had to push back and get it added to the actual supplied contract. And that was very much not easy.

And even then there's normally a "Sufficiently Different Sector" requirement for those personal projects - which makes sense, but it is inevitably worded vague enough that it would likely require going to court for pretty much any project to show it's not directly related. And that would be near prohibitively expensive for me as an individual if the relationship actually became adversarial.

[drob518]

Yes, but you have to declare them to the company and the company must approve them. If they don’t, because it’s competitive, you’re out of luck.

[deanputney]

I’ve seen this done as a carve-out or exception that has to be explicitly documented. Trouble is that documentation is not presented as simple.

[vidarh]

Common enough even in tech that I've both had contracts try to demand this, and had contracts explicitly rule it out being presented as evidence of how great the company was.

[stego-tech]

Seconded. I had to be very careful to work on side projects completely divorced from my main job for a spell, and had to get legal approval first.

The common attitude of companies is that they’re paying for the whole of your life inside and outside of “work”, and these Unions are a response to that encroachment (and associated under-compensation in general).

Good on them. Best of luck negotiating a fair contract!

[DelaneyM]

It's not at all uncommon, and important.

When someone is empowered to work remotely, and is salaried and not held to specific hours, then it's very hard to identify what work is "theirs" and what work is "the company's" in a legally consistent way. Yes, it's usually obvious from context, but context doesn't always carry to a court of law. It can be particularly messy because the kinds of open source projects one contributes to often overlap with the work they do in their day job.

So most companies which are salaried and allow WFH will usually ask employees to explicitly list any project they work on which they don't want owned by the company, with the expectation being that everything unlisted is owned by the company. It's a bit cumbersome, but generally the least bad option.

At our company we have a form to file if we do work outside of hours on OSS or pet projects, and to the best of my knowledge nobody has ever had their application denied.

edit: it's important because it's symmetric - not only does this define what _isn't_ property of the company, it defines what _is_. So if you come up with a clever solution to a problem for a company purpose and introduce it into an OSS project, it doesn't come back to haunt the company.

[sophacles]

Also worth noting - the company may not mind you doing that work today but without anything in writing the company may come after you in the future. This is particularly relevant when you're on salary and work for a company that may be acquired or experience significant board turnover. I've had several employers who were very pro- side project and pro-OSS explicitly state that they'll approve anything that doesn't compete with the core business, but get it in writing for my own protection in ideal future of post-acquisition.

[bluefirebrand]

> When someone is empowered to work remotely, and is salaried and not held to specific hours, then it's very hard to identify what work is "theirs" and what work is "the company's" in a legally consistent way

It's easy. Work done on company issued hardware belongs to the company. Everything else does not

[margalabargala]

No, it's really only companies that don't care about being shitty that do this. It's a callous lack of regard for employees that leads to the situation you describe, though you're right that it's not uncommon.

Any halfway decent company will restrict in the contract to IP that's related to the company's area of business. If you write logistics software, the company will say "we own all logistics software you write". You can't create a competitor. But if you work for a logistics software company and decide to go write a video editor on your own time, the company wouldn't own that.

[mjr00]

> If you write logistics software, the company will say "we own all logistics software you write". You can't create a competitor. But if you work for a logistics software company and decide to go write a video editor on your own time, the company wouldn't own that.

The problem is there's no clear legal definition of what "logistics software" is. A video editor is a seemingly obvious example of what is not, but what if you came up with a novel optimization technique which is not necessarily only applicable to logistics? Could you spin off that software into a separate business? What about something more fundamental, like tooling? Think about something like Slack, which was just meant to be an internal messaging tool created as part of the development of a video game. Imagine after Slack took off, that an employee claimed that because they had written Slack at least partly outside of working hours and it was not "video game software", the company didn't have ownership of the software.

This is why the common approach is that the company owns everything except anything explicitly carved out, it avoids ambiguities like this.

[margalabargala]

Yes, you're right. The common (lazy) approach for companies that don't give a shit is "we own everything because it might be complicated to introduce ambiguity and we own you anyway".

Having carveouts for obviously not-related software is easy. At a decent company populated by reasonable people, if you wanted to work on something you felt fell into the grey area, you would ask and get a written okay. Which is how it also works at many of the shitty companies! The difference is that the shitty companies there's never a route to do anything, however unrelated, without running it by HR. Because they think they own you.

> Imagine after Slack took off, that an employee claimed that because they had written Slack at least partly outside of working hours and it was not "video game software", the company didn't have ownership of the software.

On the contrary, using a nonzero amount of working hours to work on something pretty clearly makes it company property.

[mjr00]

> The difference is that the shitty companies there's never a route to do anything, however unrelated, without running it by HR. Because they think they own you.

"Shitty" companies have legal obligations to include these kind of clauses though, because investors and board members don't want to deal with a situation where there's exactly this ambiguity about what counts as "obviously not-related software". HR exists to protect the company. What counts as obviously non-related to you may not count as obviously non-related to a board member who hears about the new optimization algorithm you wrote and realizes the company can monetize it.

> On the contrary, using a nonzero amount of working hours to work on something pretty clearly makes it company property.

How recently have you seen a tech employment contract where you were obligated to work exactly 8 to 5 with a 1 hour lunch break? Flexible hours means any hour is potentially a "working hour".

[margalabargala]

> > On the contrary, using a nonzero amount of working hours to work on something pretty clearly makes it company property.

> How recently have you seen a tech employment contract where you were obligated to work exactly 8 to 5 with a 1 hour lunch break? Flexible hours means any hour is potentially a "working hour".

Not what I meant. In the Slack example, it was planned work within the company, made using company resources. Working on something for internal company use that the company has a Jira ticket for is pretty blatantly on the side of "Company time".

> "Shitty" companies have legal obligations to include these kind of clauses though, because investors and board members don't want to deal with a situation

Not wanting to deal with something isn't a legal obligation not to do it. I don't want to deal with filing taxes but that doesn't mean I now have a legal obligation not to file taxes. It's just laziness.

[stego-tech]

Can't speak for creative fields, but it's remarkably common in tech. It was tolerable when wages meant we could afford rent or possibly a home and job security was excellent, but that's no longer the case, and thus folks are starting to push back on that excessive overreach.

See also "anti-moonlighting" and "anti-social media" clauses. Hell, I've seen the odd story of folks being fired/disciplined for their dating profiles before. If the government doesn't tell them no, companies will take every inch they can get.

[jballanc]

My first job after finishing my undergrad degree was performing quality analysis on corn starch. As a condition of employment, I had to sign a paper saying anything I invented related to corn was property of my employer.

[InitialLastName]

It's extremely common in lots of creative and technical fields. It is usually restricted to work related to the employer's field and the employee's function, but one could imagine some employers of folks in the creative arena being a bit more... expansive in their interpretation.

[littlecranky67]

This is common in Germany at least in the scope of patents and inventions. That is, if you make any invention at have it patented or market it outside of your job, your employer owns that patent and the profits ("Arbeitnehmererfindungen"). Luckily, a slow beaurocratic government works sometimes in our favour, as they never updates the law to apply to software, and software is not patentable in Germany or the EU - so we can work on side projects in software without that affecting us. But if you are a mechanical engineer, you are screwed.

[Dunedan]

That's not correct. "Arbeitnehmererfindungen" only apply to inventions you make as part of your paid work. See https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arbeitnehmererfindung

Whatever you do in your spare time is up to you and your employer has no saying over it, unless he can prove that it negatively impacts your job performance.

[tristor]

Unfortunately IP assignment agreements are very common, even in non-creative roles and fields. Many many many companies have overly-broad employment agreements in the US, mostly because they know few people will challenge it and that the legal protections for workers are basically nothing. I personally will never sign an IP assignment agreement that isn't explicitly scoped to apply only to work hours and company-provided equipment. What I do on my own time with my own equipment is my own business.

[thegrim33]

When I was looking for my last job a company wanted me to sign something similar to that. I declined their offer and got a job elsewhere instead.

I feel like that's .. the reasonable take here? If you don't agree to their conditions, then .. just don't work there?

[bee_rider]

It’s basically true that everything about employment is a negotiation and if you don’t like the deal at one place you can try to negotiate it differently, or work elsewhere. Of course, unionization is a legitimate move in that negotiation.

[paulddraper]

Pretty common actually.

It’s called “broad assignment of IP.” Some jurisdictions disallow that clause.

And then of course there is the distinct but thematically similar anti-moonlighting clause.

Overreaching but common. Like most things, lawyers will take as much as they can possibly get.

[red-iron-pine]

every IT and dev gig I've been at / around basically said "anything you create is ours and we have ROFR on any LLCs or companies you found"

in practice that is either unenforceable or else a giant waste of the company's money, but it's CYA in case someone doing engineering or creative work decides to rip it off elsewhere.

like Meta ain't gonna try to steal your local cupcakes at the farmer's market side gig

[natbennett]

A clause like this is pretty standard in software company employment contracts, at least in the California/Silicon Valley zone. There’s sometimes an exception for explicitly named items that pre-date your employment but sometimes they try to claim ownership of stuff you made before joining the company too.

[drob518]

Typically there’s a way to declare things that you are working on before you start at the company to prevent them trying to sue you for rights to prior work.

[cbarrick]

Google has a similar clause in their employee contracts. I assume most tech companies do.

That doesn't mean it is enforceable, though.

[DaiPlusPlus]

In contrast to Google, Microsoft, my former employer, probably has (had?) the best policy amongst big tech: moonlighting wasn't just tolerated, but actively encouraged! (...provided it runs on Windows, of course) ...because it's basically free training/experience if it means exposure to new APIs/platforms/libs/concepts - and definitely helps the morale levels of folks who love to build things but who ended-up with an extremely narrow-scoped job at the company (e.g. PMs who don't get to write code, or SDETs and SREs that only get noticed by management when they don't do their jobs).

During the launch of Windows 8, Msft's moonlighting policy was also part of their Windows App Store strategy: we were all heavily encouraged to make an "Windows Store App-app" so that SteveB could claim MS had N-many apps in its app-store, because that's how Leadership thought they could build credibility vs. Apple's established app store (of course, what actually ended-up happening was hundreds of cr-apps that were just WebView-wrappers over live websites).

In contrast, I understand Apple might have the worst moonlighting policy: I'm told that unless you directly work on WebKit or Darwin then you have to deactivate your GitHub account or else find yourself swiftly dragged onto the proverbial Trash.

[mort96]

I've seen it in a couple software developer contracts here in Norway. I find it despicable and have always gotten it removed from any contract before signing. I don't get why it's even legal to have in contracts. I certainly hope it's unenforceable.

[eloisant]

It depends on the juridiction, it might not be legal or enforceable in Norway but it definitely is at least in California.

There is the famous lawsuit of Mattel suing Bratz, on the basis that the Bratz creator started to work on his new dolls while being employed by Mattel.

I'm not sure how it ended, but it wasn't dismissed right away and they spent years in court.

[margalabargala]

> There is the famous lawsuit of Mattel suing Bratz, on the basis that the Bratz creator started to work on his new dolls while being employed by Mattel.

That's at least reasonable considering Bratz is a competitor.

If the Bratz creator started working on them while working for a company that made water filters, that would not be reasonable.

[drob518]

It’s very enforceable.