[tagabek]

they claim ownership over whatever you create, including stuff you do in your off hours, and any ideas you may have had.

Does this mean that if you are working on side projects during your free time (ie. at home on weekends), you do not own them?

[_delirium]

Many employment contracts try to claim that, or something that practically amounts to the same. Some states do limit the enforceability of such contracts. For example California prohibits the company from trying to grab ownership of inventions produced entirely in one's spare time: http://www.leginfo.ca.gov/cgi-bin/displaycode?section=lab&gr...

However, even in CA's case there is a big exception: work that is closely related to the employer's business might still be owned by the employer, on the theory that if you developed something closely related to your day job (you work at an industrial-sensors company and are developing your own industrial sensors on weekends), you probably inevitably used some of the employer's trade secrets / business information / etc. in developing it. Whereas if you develop a side project in a different area (you work at an industrial-sensors company and are developing C++ dev tools on weekends), you're more in the clear.

The problem with how that interacts with Google is that nearly every field of technology is related to Google's business! They do search, datacenter infrastructure, IaaS, PaaS, operating systems, programming languages, compilers, robotics, computer vision, AI, storage systems, email, mobile apps, mobile phones, office/productivity software, news aggregation, data visualization, etc. So it's difficult to come up with a safe side project that isn't closely related to your employer's business.