Silhouette's point is that the good employers use language that qualifies the inventions to which they are entitled: on company time or equipment and relevant to the company's business, etc..
Or, instead of that, they hand you a piece of paper where you get to list your inventions. Which is much simpler, less prone to misinterpretation and perhaps a reason why everyone does it that way.
Perhaps instead of that, they should give you a list of inventions which they own and you sign that, and anything else that you come up with on your own time is yours.
It's ultimately about power. You rely upon the company for sustenance, it doesn't rely upon you. That manifests in contractual terms which are basically designed to give the company license to completely screw you.
Perhaps instead of that, they should give you a list of inventions which they own and you sign that, and anything else that you come up with on your own time is yours.
If the "list everything you've ever done" argument is reasonable, then the logical counter is actually rather stronger than that.
The true equivalent would be that the company must list all inventions and IP they have ever created in their history, including before you joined. Rights to anything they don't list automatically belong to you as the new employee, even if it was created on a work PC during working hours as a result of an employee's current job and the employee was duly paid for it. And if the employer then inadvertently grants rights to one employee and then the same rights to another one later, as they will for any invention or other IP they forgot to list, they are legally on the hook for any damages when it turns out they couldn't actually grant the rights the second (and third, and fourth...) time. Finally, employees are not required to accept any new items the company wants to add to its list of claimed inventions and IP, even if the new item is entirely created by staff on company time and using company resources.
I think it's fair to say you'd have trouble finding a company lawyer who advised their client to accept that kind of term. And yet companies attempt to impose the equivalent on their employees all the time.
Hehe, my point was that both qualifying language and an explicit list are not mutually incompatible; in fact we have both in my current assignment of inventions agreement.
Oh, I have no trouble believing that. It's certainly possible to write a more humane AoI. But the purpose of these is mostly to make sure that they don't matter, so I was hoping to reassure the OP that (with basic care) such agreements don't matter and that the 'get a lawyer' and 'this isn't how it is in the UK' pitchfork crowd is simply wrong.
If you have a nicer, professionally-vetted, less scary-sounding AoI, that's terrific. I'd encourage you to post it somewhere as a template.