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From: fnf@unisoft.UUCP (Fred Fish)
Newsgroups: net.micro.mac,net.legal
Subject: Re: Company/Employee rights to home developed MAC software
Message-ID: <454@unisoft.UUCP>
Date: Wed, 8-May-85 22:02:31 EDT
Article-I.D.: unisoft.454
Posted: Wed May  8 22:02:31 1985
Date-Received: Sun, 12-May-85 02:16:01 EDT
References: <2024@decwrl.UUCP>
Reply-To: fnf@unisoft.UUCP (I am the great and Oz)
Organization: UniSoft Systems, Berkeley
Lines: 28
Xref: linus net.micro.mac:1315 net.legal:1305


From George Van Treeck @ AI Technology Group, Digital Equip Corp.

>     I work for Digital Equip. Corp. as a software engineer. I have been
> told by my manager, who has consulted with the DEC's legal department, that
> DEC owns all software that I develop at home on my MAC.  ...

Not being a lawyer take all the following with a huge grain of salt ...

My understanding of the situation is that unless they can show that you
used any of their hardware or software resouces, or that your product was
something that you could reasonably be expected to produce as a part of
your employment, you can tell them to go fly a kite.

I.E. if you are an applications programming doing Fortran development at
DEC and you write a game for your MAC from scratch, using none of their
proprietary code or algorithms, then you are probably safe.

But if you are a compiler developer doing development work on their
VMS compiler and you decide to implement a MAC compiler on the side,
you might have some problems.

Naturally, talk to a lawyer if this is important enough to you.  Here
in California there are very explicit laws about what claims an employer
has to an employee's intellectual property, regardless of any
employment contracts you may have been required to sign.

-Fred