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From: barmar@mit-eddie.UUCP (Barry Margolin)
Newsgroups: net.micro.mac
Subject: Re: Company vs Employee Software rights
Message-ID: <4308@mit-eddie.UUCP>
Date: Mon, 20-May-85 03:06:39 EDT
Article-I.D.: mit-eddi.4308
Posted: Mon May 20 03:06:39 1985
Date-Received: Tue, 21-May-85 04:47:56 EDT
References: <122@watmum.UUCP> <461@unisoft.UUCP>
Reply-To: barmar@mit-eddie.UUCP (Barry Margolin)
Organization: MIT, Cambridge, MA
Lines: 29

In article <461@unisoft.UUCP> pc@unisoft.UUCP (Paul Campbell) writes:
>	Just for information the California Labour Code Section 2870 reads as
>follows
>	Article 3.5 Inventions Made by an Employee
>...
>and (a) which does not
>relate (1) to the  business of the employer
>...

OK, so that means that Honeywell can't demand that I turn over the
copyright when I write a novel, since they aren't in the novel business.
However, if I owned a computer and developed software for it and tried
to sell it, they could easily maintain that it relates to their business
as a software development company, even if they don't currently sell
software for that particular computer.  The point is that "the business
of the employer" can be taken liberally or precisely; DEC may feel that
it is software development, while the employee may think that it is
software development on hardware manufactured by DEC.  I suspect that
the employee would lose the argument, as DEC probably has procedures for
doing contract work on other manufacturers' machines in order to sell
large, multi-vendor systems.  I know that my employer, Honeywell,
produces software for IBM-PC's (mostly for use along with our
proprietary systems, but there are some general purpose PC products).
Therefore, I doubt that I could sell PC software that I wrote at home
(if I had a PC at home).
-- 
    Barry Margolin
    ARPA: barmar@MIT-Multics
    UUCP: ..!genrad!mit-eddie!barmar