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From: ech@pyuxll.UUCP (Ned Horvath)
Newsgroups: net.legal
Subject: Re: Ownership of your Inventions et al.
Message-ID: <412@pyuxll.UUCP>
Date: Sun, 4-Sep-83 00:47:51 EDT
Article-I.D.: pyuxll.412
Posted: Sun Sep  4 00:47:51 1983
Date-Received: Sun, 4-Sep-83 04:24:40 EDT
References: <229@bunkerb.UUCP>
Organization: American Bell, South Plainfield NJ
Lines: 37

The agreement you refer to, signed on the first day of work, to assign
*everything* to the company, is indeed pretty universal.  It's also
generally considered (by lawyers I have consulted) to be utterly
unenforceable.

Rather, the agreement is meant to let you know that the company is hiring
you to perform certain tasks, and that they expect to own what they
pay you to develop.  I think this to be wholly reasonable; reverse
the tables: you have hired someone to provide you with a service, or
develop some product for you.  You are paying for it, don't you expect
to own it?

The way the agreement must be interpreted, in any court of law, is that
the company owns what they pay you to develop.  Period.  The recent
question on net.legal from the person who developed software on their
own home computer on their own time actually has a very clear answer:
the company has no claim whatever, would almost certainly not attempt
to press such a claim in court, and would CERTAINLY lose the case if it did.

In the final analysis, that agreement is merely a request that you act in
good faith (granted that it is phrased so as to scare the excrement out of
you).  The fourteenth amendment prevents the company -- or anyone else --
from owning you or your brain.  Common sense -- which is what gets applied
here -- says that what the company buys, it gets: you don't take your
code with you when you leave (the company owns it, rightfully), but you
own your expertise, even if it was developed in part doing the job for
the company: you are perfectly free to build a new, presumably superior,
version which they DON'T own.

This is distinct from the case where you are developing the same thing
for the company and "on your own," otherwise known as conflict of interest.
Such conflicts MUST be avoided, but again, common sense rules.  Keep your
moonlighting far from your on-the-job work and you are clean.

And hope the judge is sane...

=Ned=