
Google claims copyright on employee side projects - zoobab
https://twitter.com/marcan42/status/1207234468928356352
======
fierarul
> Oh, please. It's standard industry practice for companies to claim ownership
> of everything a software engineer comes up with, even "on their own time".

In the US. Problem is the US is infecting the rest of the world too,
especially through subsidiaries which basically just translate from English
the 'standard' employment contract.

I had to refuse employment in Romania since the clauses were so broad and
basically illegal under Romanian law. (Of course, I had no interest in proving
in court they were illegal but the contract was reviewed by an attorney on my
side).

So, yeah, maybe apply some logic. If the employer owns your brain 24h/day
maybe the hourly rate your are getting is not such a great deal.

And don't get me stared on clauses the survive the contract, including multi-
year employment bans to competitors, etc. For a large multinational that
basically mean you have to get a job landscaping or something because they
compete with anybody would offer you a comparable job for your skills.

This 'standard industry practice' should die.

~~~
q3k
Can confirm from my experience (~10 years in the industry). I've never even
heard of this practice until I applied to Google. None of the EU companies
I've worked at before had anything like this. None of the EU companies I've
worked at since had anything like this.

It's US imperialism, nothing less.

~~~
christophilus
I work in the US and have always had side-projects, and have never signed
anything which would give my employer the rights to them. I think this isn't
just a US thing, but a US mega-corporate thing, maybe?

~~~
twunde
I hadn't seen this until recently. It seems to be pushed by VCs and the tech
megacorps, so if you work at a VC-backed startup it's likely in your contract
or if you work for one of the bigger tech companies. I believe IBM had this
for a long time. If you're working for a company outside of "pure tech", it's
much rarer

------
draugadrotten
Does society accept this behaviour outside tech? Imagine that a Michelin
restaurant would claim copyright on the dishes cooked by the chef in his spare
time. Or that the big farm would ask for a piece of those carrots grown in the
back yard.

~~~
martin-adams
Intellectual Property and Copyright aren't quite the same thing. The IP is the
idea, whereas the copyright is the specific recipe.

So in my mind, the equivalent would be using your learned cooking skills for
another restaurant while working at a Michelin restaurant. They both serve
food (competing or related industry), but while the dishes are different, the
techniques to create them come from the same source.

I wouldn't expect a Michelin restaurant to stop someone cooking in their spare
time, just that they can't copy their exact dishes in part or full and compete
with them.

~~~
mcv
Intellectual Property isn't really a thing in itself. It's a vague collection
of a couple of different concepts, including Copyright, Patents and
Trademarks.

Those are three very different kinds of temporary monopolies granted by the
government, but the people who promote the phrase "intellectual property" want
them to be considered as not a government-granted monopoly on a certain kind
of business, but as a natural form of property comparable to physical
property, which it really isn't.

~~~
smichel17
Perhaps we could try to rebrand IP as "Innovation Protections"?

~~~
anticensor
Good idea but will not pass the parliementarians.

------
tytso
Oh, please. It's standard industry practice for companies to claim ownership
of everything a software engineer comes up with, even "on their own time". The
problem is it's extremely difficult to say, figure out when someone might have
invented some super clever idea which can be pantented "on their own time".
This was true when I worked for MIT, VA Linux, IBM, and Google. At VA Linux it
was the VC's which insisted on that clause in the employee's contracts. So
anyone who think this is some evidence of Google being, or becoming, evil is
either seriously misinformed, or just engaging in unthinking hate of Google,
or both.

In fact, Google has one of the most permissive IP policies that I've seen at
any company except for VA Linux Systems. The default is that the vast majority
of work done by an employee can be released under an open source license.
Sure, there's a process that you have to go through, and unless what you want
to do intersects with work that you are doing for your team that isn't
intended to be released publically, or competes with a critical company
initiative, the default answer is that it will be allowed to be released.

This is _not_ true for many, if not most companies, and as a responsible open
source maintainer, I make sure that people understand they have permission
from their company before I accept their open source contributions. Otherwise,
I would be putting them, and the project, at risk. (Note that because of this,
there are many employees which are not allowed to participate in open source
development, because their employers will not give them permission to release
code written by an employee under an open source license, whether written "on
their own time" or not.)

At Google, once you get this (mostly pro forma) permission, you can work on
open source projects on your own time, or on 20% time, using company laptops,
or using GCE resources, etc. When I was hired at Google, my manager and I cut
a deal such that I could work on Linux Kernel and community projects for 50%
of my time, instead of the normal 20%. Sure, the overlap between what was good
for Google and what was good for ext4/Linux was pretty broad, but Google also
paid for me to travel to various conferences in Asia, Australia, Europe, etc.

Also unique to Google is there is a process by which you can get permission
for you to out-and-out own the work done on your own time, as opposed to
Google owning it and releasing it under an open source license. If you take
that option then it really has to be done on your own time, and must not use
any company resources, meaning not on a company laptop, or on a company
network, etc. This is rare, and I'm not aware of many other companies that
give employees that option.

~~~
danShumway
It's absurd for any company to say they're going to attract passionate
programmers, and then expect them to just roll over and give up projects that
were started before they even joined at the company.

If you're Google, you can get away with this because you just throw so much
money at people that they're willing to temporarily put their life on hold for
3-4 years.

But for any other company, people who are genuinely passionate about something
are not going to let you dictate their entire involvement or own everything
they produce. My current employer doesn't own "everything" that I produce,
only projects that would present a clear conflict of interest. I don't have to
be secretive, they know what I'm working on outside of my job -- not even just
Open Source stuff, but even closed-source projects that I'm looking to
monetize.

I would never, ever join a company that didn't (in writing) allow me to retain
ownership of my side projects.

That's the tradeoff. You want your programmers to take initiative, stay up to
date in the field, stay creative? You want them to be able to propose novel
solutions to your problems, and think outside of the box? You have to let them
go outside of the box, and do the things outside of work that keep them in
that frame of mind.

If your programmers are scared to experiment outside of work, because they
have to run a calculus of whether or not an idea is worth putting on hold
until they can actually own it -- well then, surprise, they're not going to
experiment outside of work, and your software quality will suffer for it.

People like tytso, who are effectively being _sponsored_ by Google to work on
their side projects, might be an exception. Most of your programmers will not
be an exception.

~~~
tikiman163
I think your reaction here is similar to how people reacted to the headline
that a woman sued her 5 year old nephew for accidentally breaking her arm. She
was actually suing the parent's home owners insurance policy because the
policy is supposed to cover these kinds of accidents. The insurance company
didn't want to pay out though, so they spun the story to a news broadcaster in
an effort to shame her into dropping the claim.

Most cases where an employer claims ownership of something an engineer did on
their own time, it's because the engineer decided to create a competing
product and used information or other ip they only had access to as an
employee. The guy trying to sell his competing product doesn't want to
acknowledge that they've violated a non-compete or NDA they signed, so they
publicly claim their employer is just being a bunch of greedy bastards. When
you dig into known cases of employers claiming ownership of an employees
outside work there are cases where they worked on it before they joined, but
those are outliers, and having initial work from before joining doesn't mean
that later work hasn't infringed on the employers existing IP.

This topic is often complicated, but the realistic answer is that you should
always tell your employer that you've started working on something and have it
acknowledged as yours way before any valuable IP is created. Not doing so
isn't just irresponsible, it's a known business pattern that results in
failure. You should ideally tell them before you've even answered the question
of how you intend to do it. Nobody is going to steal a vague idea, so this
just eliminates the possible argument later. A lack of ability to trust is a
strong indicator of eventual failure of the project anyway, so there simply
isn't a reason to avoid doing it.

~~~
danShumway
This isn't a _bad_ argument, but it doesn't match up with the experience that
OP had in the Twitter thread.

I don't see the point in arguing about what most theoretical cases are when we
can instead talk about the actual case that actually happened here. It's
difficult to argue that OP stole anything, and they weren't competing with
Google, and OP is saying that they didn't use company resources to build
anything.

Unless your claim is that OP actually did something wrong, the rest of it a
little too theoretical for me.

I've written this elsewhere, but if obvious abuses were all that companies
cared about, the terms wouldn't be written so broadly as to cover everything.
A contract is not the place to put an egregious term and then say, "don't
worry, we won't enforce it." Treat contracts like they will be enforced.

In particular, we've seen this pattern with arbitration agreements. How many
women signed Google's arbitration agreements when they joined under the
(false) assumption that, "of course for something serious like sexual abuse,
Google wouldn't enforce that"?

> you should always tell your employer that you've started working on
> something and have it acknowledged as yours way before any valuable IP is
> created

I do heavily agree with you on this.

Don't do what OP did and just ignore the terms, be up front about what you're
doing. It just removes doubt. And don't be afraid to walk away from a company
if they won't negotiate on this kind of stuff. You want to be in a trusting
relationship with your employer.

------
raphlinus
Counterpoint: I open sourced a _lot_ of stuff while I was at Google. There is
some friction in the open source releasing and IARC policies (one of my
projects got denied), but generally the open source teams at Google want you
to do good work. And having clear documentation of ownership is actually
helpful; there's a lot of dodgy stuff out there where you're not sure who
actually has the rights.

Contrast to Apple, where, aside from a few high profile open source projects
that help drive their business (Webkit, Swift, llvm), open source contribution
is quite discouraged. How many fun Apple side projects do you see on Github?

I really enjoy the freedom now of just being able to click "create repo"
whenever I feel like it, and am sad about the corporatization of the world
economy, but I think Google is doing about as well as you can expect here.

~~~
sitkack
You are also famous and had a big OSS presence before joining Google, you
worked on Google blessed OSS software while employed there. You are in no way
typical of the bullshit other folks have to go through.

~~~
kllrnohj
The Twitter OP also had his random OSS project approved in IARC and he wasn't
famous. He also even says the workflow today is much more permissive than it
was when he joined (aka, it's gotten _better_ )

Then again, twitter OP also is attempting to apply boolean logic to legal
documents as if that whole "BUT TECHNICALLY" bullshit actually flies in court.
He had a bad experience on 1 of 2 projects, decided to contribute to a 3rd
knowingly violating policies (legal liability much?), got chewed out for it
(but not fired or "retaliated against"), and is now ranting about that
experience from many years ago on twitter.

~~~
marcan_42
I had two projects go through IARC. One was approved (after a month or two
wait IIRC) explicitly because Google wants _nothing_ to do with console
hacking projects, emulators, etc. The other was a completely normal OSS
project that ships in Ubuntu these days, and it was denied with no explanation
or recourse.

It's gotten better, but that doesn't negate my experience. I'm sharing it now,
and didn't in the past, because if Google really made a mistake in their Irish
contracts in favor of their employees, I didn't want to jinx it for other
people. I assume the contract has changed enough by now that it doesn't
matter. I also hold no grudge with Google, I left on excellent terms and
otherwise enjoyed my experience there - but this IP ownership BS was one of
the things that tipped the scale towards moving on to other things in my life.

I _was_ retaliated against, by being explicitly forbidden from ever actually
using the relevant corporate processes that other employees enjoyed. I was
lucky my contract turned out to be in my favor, or else I might have just left
the company at that point.

As for the Boolean logic stuff, you don't need to know what Boolean logic is
to be able to read an "or" in a contract. I simply used Boolean logic to
explain the subtle difference between my Irish contract and California law. No
Irish judge is going to look at my contract and say "well, actually, this is
CLEARLY intended to be like California law so that applies here now". The
contract, as written, gave me the right to my own work as long as I didn't use
company property or do it as a direct result of my work at the company. Just
because I explained it in CS terms doesn't mean I'm riding on some obscure
technicality.

------
A4ET8a8uTh0
I personally think this is just another step in a series of many reminding us
that Google has become just another US corporation. And a way those grow is by
finding 'efficiencies','doing more with less' and leveraging their size. It is
an end of an era.

Then again, Jimmy Johns was always pretty bad for the workers and attempted to
have kids working there signing non-competes.

Maybe we should be happy it took google so long.

edit: 2 more paragraphs

~~~
jsolson
> Maybe we should be happy it took google so long.

If you read the thread you'll note that this policy has been around for a long
time (at least the ~7 years I've been with Google). The author also notes
that, in terms of open source, things have become dramatically _more_
permissive over time.

~~~
deogeo
That's exactly it, isn't it? Thanks to such restrictive contracts, you need
Google's _permission_.

~~~
jsolson
I do, yes, and that Google grants that permission relatively (to some others
companies) freely is a small part of why I work there. I could quit and work
on whatever I want, but eventually I'd need to worry about how to pay my
mortgage. I could also go work for a smaller company without such a clause in
their contract, but part of what I like about my job is the resources
available to tackle problems, and I'd likely lose some of that.

Employment often imposes lots of restrictions on the actions we can take. I'm
fortunate enough to have some choice in the set of restrictions I have to live
with, so for me this particular restriction is just part of the deal.

------
nullc
At my prior company we explicitly disclaimed copyright interest in employee
contributions to a long list of standard open source software which included
by reference the entire OIN Linux system definition, specifically to avoid any
complication related to employees contributing patches back to the open source
tools they used in the course of their work (and accordingly this covered not
just work done on their own time, but also contributions made the course of
their work). Employees were also invited to nominate additional pieces of
software fairly liberally, particularly free software that didn't overlap with
the organization's central business.

While promoting permissive approaches like this with other organizations I've
encountered employers which seem to have a some confusion about the purposes
of different parts of their agreement. E.g. an IP agreement is essentially
unrelated to making sure an employee is doing their job-- so a "I don't want
them spending a lot of time on that" isn't a valid reason to impinge their
rights, after all they would be perfectly able to slack off by staring blankly
at the coffee pot regardless of what your IP agreement says.

An IP agreement should be about having a clear boundary on company property,
it's not a replacement for effective management. Unless you're an operating
system company (which to some extent google is, but very few of the
innumerable companies that copy google's practices are), trivial fixes to
widely used open source software are not good candidates for company property
and are not at all candidates for it if developed on the employee's own time.

~~~
Xylakant
I really like that approach - is there any chance to get more information
about that list? Like how it was compiled and maintained, maybe even the list
itself?

------
Arathorn
For what it's worth, this is something we've struggled with at New Vector
(vector.im), the company we set up to keep the core Matrix.org dev team
gainfully employed. On one hand, we don't want a nightmare where a rogue
employee goes and claims that the work they did on the day job is actually
their personal IP and tries to relicense or patent it somehow. On the other
hand, 90% of what we do is open source and it's critical to let everyone keep
hacking on their personal FOSS projects unencumbered.

The current UK employment contracts try to solve it with this construct:
10.2.1 is a general "everything you do belongs to the company", and then
10.2.2 carves out "...except for stuff you do in your spare time, if it's
unrelated to your dayjob work". We (happily) haven't had to try it in anger
yet, but hopefully it's a reasonable enough compromise. Pretty much everyone
in the UK had unilateral "everything you do belongs to the company" contracts
in previous gigs, so in theory it's an improvement.

\---

10.2.1 You shall give the Company full written details of all Inventions and
of all works embodying Intellectual Property Rights made wholly or partially
by you at any time during the course of your employment which relate to, or
are reasonably capable of being used in, the business of the Company. You
acknowledge that, save as set out below, all Intellectual Property Rights
subsisting (or which may in the future subsist) in all such Inventions and
works shall automatically, on creation, vest in the Company absolutely. To the
extent that they do not vest automatically, you hold them on trust for the
Company. You agree promptly to execute all documents and do all acts as may,
in the opinion of the Company, be necessary to give effect to this clause
10.2.

10.2.2 The above is subject to it being agreed that Intellectual Property
Rights created by you outside the reasonable scope of your work for the
Company and not related to the business of the Company (provided in any case
that they are created outside working hours) may be retained by you. This
policy seeks to strike a balance between providing creative freedom for
employees to pursue their own interests outside of work with an understanding
that creations and advances which should properly be for the benefit of New
Vector or Matrix will be assigned to the relevant one of them.

~~~
marcan_42
The problem is "related to the business of the company". For a small company,
that may seem reasonable, because the company probably only does one or two
things. However, for a large company like Google, that basically means
"everything".

In my opinion, the right approach is to instead talk about _your_ work duties
at the company. If you work on your own time on something unrelated to your
work duties, but related to someone else's at the company, you should still
get to keep full rights to your work. If you weren't asked to do that work for
your job, why would the company have a right to the result, even if they find
they have some interest in it?

------
S_A_P
I do software consulting sleeved through various contracting or consulting
companies. All of the paperwork I have to sign tries to have a claim to any IP
created at the job. I immediately red line this unless there is some sort of
reasonableness to it. I don’t mind giving some percentage of IP to a company
that kept me busy somewhere for a year and the Resultant IP isn’t the main
focus of the engagement. They are right that it probably wouldn’t have
happened if they had not given me the opportunity. Otherwise I am not going to
relinquish the right rights to code written to solve a problem. Most clauses
I’ve seen are in this vein. Nope. DRY.

~~~
rs23296008n1
DRY?

~~~
S_A_P
Dont repeat yourself. IF you have code that solves a problem, dont rewrite it
at every gig...

~~~
rs23296008n1
Now thats a philosophy I both agree and disagree with.

Agree: omg do i need to write this form again? Seriously just write a library
already!

Disagree: this problem is subtly yet incompatibly different to what I've seen
and dealt with before. The library would need x,y,z but their IP demands mean
I'd lose rights to my closed-source library or be forced to open source it to
keep using it elsewhere.

~~~
S_A_P
I agree with you. The only absolute is that there are no absolutes. However
what the practical application of DRY ends up being for me is that I have a
"bag of tricks" I carry with me as well as my own "library o' repetitious
programming tasks" that I look into first. Much of the time I can save a lot
of time by reusing old code. I may have a bit of code that is too specific for
the original purpose and get tired of the technical debt it causes, and re-
write it. So in that case I am repeating myself, but its with the benefit of
experience. More of a refactor than repeat.

------
strenholme
It is my understanding that there has never been a case in California where a
court has said “OK, your employer owns that open source patch you made at 3am
on your own laptop”. Poking around, _Applied Materials, Inc. v. Advanced
Micro-Fabrication Equipment_ comes to mind; here is a summary:

[https://www.arnoldporter.com/en/perspectives/publications/20...](https://www.arnoldporter.com/en/perspectives/publications/2009/06/ip-
alert-new-decision-may-undermine-claims-to-ip__)

The only public case I know of where a company has been able to claim the open
source software someone made in their own time is the Nginx case which is
ongoing right now in Russia. [1] I remember a story about someone in the US
(not in California) where they were asked by their employer to stop working on
open source Perl code in their own spare time, but there was, as I recall, no
litigation there.

As for myself, I am very careful to make it clear, when signing an
“inventions” clause, that I will work on MaraDNS in my own personal time while
employed. I also go to a lot of effort to date stamp my open source code, and
to only use versions of my open source code written _before_ I signed the
“inventions” clause for anything work related. Actually, I prefer working as
an independent contractor for employers who do not burden me with an
“inventions” clause.

[1] The details are different: As I understand it, Igor Sysoev was given
permission from his employer to work on nginx while at the job, and the legal
stuff didn’t come up for well over a decade after Sysoev left Rambler, and, of
course, it’s in Russia, so it’s somewhat different than the “3am commit on
one’s own laptop in California” issue.

~~~
TACIXAT
If that is the case then why is this a law? Why isn't the law more clear to
reflect reality? I don't really want a gun pointed at me, regardless of
whether I'm about to get shot. The threat and power structure is still there.

~~~
pc86
Because there's no incentive to change the law precisely _because_ it's never
been a problem. Despite the popular narrative, legislators are typically
pretty busy (a lot of this is self-inflicted, though). So striking a law that
has never been enforced a certain way because it _might_ be enforced that way
isn't a very productive use of their limited time, especially when courts have
ruled quite the opposite.

------
brendon9x
Our lack of IP assignment waiver was red-flagged during a VC due-diligence
exercise. It became a non-negotiable item, and we got all our employees to
sign a waiver. Our waiver has an exclusion list similar to Google's IARC, but
unlike Google we have allowed 100% of all exclusions that employees have
submitted.

It did seem the VCs were far more worried about a rogue former employee
somehow acquiring IP rights over our core IP than stealing unrelated work from
our employees. No-one has been able to explain to me how this might happen
though; I suspect it's all paranoia.

~~~
cbhl
> rogue former employee somehow acquiring IP rights over our core IP

"Rogue ex-co-founder comes out of the woodwork X years later and claims they
own half of your thing" is a horror story in startup land; see Facebook for an
example of this. (The Social Network movie is a fictionalized depiction, but
the real-world drama was sufficiently troublesome for Facebook that they
initially weren't planning on engaging with the movie. Last minute they
decided to rent a theater to take the whole company to see it, and Jesse
Eisenberg started helping Mark Zuckerberg with his public speaking.)

------
thundergolfer
This isn't surprising, though it does suck that employees have to jump through
these hoops to avoid having our work claimed by employers.

The way to go is to never use company resources or company time when working
on personal things and also never work on something that they'd want.

Sometimes it's convenient to break the first 2 rules so it's annoying to make
sure to never use my work laptop/internet/office when working on personal
stuff, but it's doable. The last bit is certainly quite tricky when you're at
Google but I'm at Canva (design+marketing softwares) so all of my stuff is
fine.

For stuff you'd like to monetise we send an email to our 'bosses' about it and
they give an upfront a-OK.

~~~
clarry
> Sometimes it's convenient to break the first 2 rules so it's annoying to
> make sure to never use my work laptop/internet/office when working on
> personal stuff, but it's doable.

For me, remote work makes this very easy. My office is a bedroom in my
apartment. My internet plan. I have a work laptop, strictly for work stuff,
and my own laptop right next to it. I don't work on my own projects on company
time, but I might on a lunch break (when I'm clocked out).

(I occasionally use my own laptop to help with work stuff though -- having an
extra device with an ethernet port comes in handy for tcpdumping stuff without
having to try isolate the traffic I want from everything else going through
the work laptop)

------
masukomi
I've been able to alter that "we own your crap" section of every employment
contract I've needed to. Don't sign. speak up. Carefully write and submit a
reasonable alternative. This may be harder with megacorps...

With the prior company it was basically just altering it to say they don't own
anything I created prior to my employment even if i continue to work on it and
that I would give them notification for new projects.

This is a bit easier when your company does _one_ thing and you simply don't
write any code related to that industry on your free time. Harder with a
Google that does pretty much everything.

In general, you have the power to alter this and your NDA, as long as your
suggestions are reasonable. I find it best to use my programmer brain and
simple language to write out a very precise bit of replacement language and
give it to them as a suggestion of what you want.

My co. just updated their NDA and I noticed my changes from when I was offered
a job in the new version.

~~~
ryandrake
Mind mentioning which companies? I’ve tried in all companies I’ve worked with
(some FAANG, some medium sized companies) and none of them are willing to even
touch terms including IP assignment clauses. Without exception it was “Sign it
unmodified it GTFO!”

------
FpUser
I was lucky that I've always had my own projects/products and I was employed
as a full time software developer only once in my life. During the hiring they
brought me a contract that had this sleazy IP clause. I told them that there
is no way I can sign anything like that but will be more then happy to sign
simple and fair non compete clause. The employer did just that: they replaced
the IP ownership clause.

------
andy_ppp
This Joel on Software article seems relevant:
[https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2016/12/09/developers-side-
pr...](https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2016/12/09/developers-side-projects/)

I totally disagree with the sentiments though and would prefer copyright to be
transferred on a project by project basis. Why do businesses seem to say that
it's so difficult to know what should be owned by the company you work for?
Surely a well run company has a clear understanding of what a developer is
working on _at work_. They own everything to do with that and nothing else
right?

And yes, if I start a search engine competitive with Google in my spare time I
suspect they own the search engine, but if I start a second hand clothing app
they do not! I seriously do not understand where the difficulty is in defining
this?

------
pabs3
When I was renegotiating my contract, Software Freedom Conservancy reminded me
that everything is negotiable, so I negotiated ownership of all open source
code I produce for my employer in addition to the existing ownership of side
projects.

[https://sfconservancy.org/contractpatch/](https://sfconservancy.org/contractpatch/)
[https://lists.sfconservancy.org/pipermail/contractpatch/2018...](https://lists.sfconservancy.org/pipermail/contractpatch/2018-February/000014.html)

------
kaisuketrax
This is why the need for aliases and anonymity is crucial in these situations.
Do your thing but if you value it, take necessary precautions.

~~~
onion2k
Google could claim ownership _and damages_ if you deliberately hid a
successful side project from them. Even if they didn't find out, the risk
would certainly be enough to scare off any potential investors or disrupt an
exit.

------
wccrawford
The tweeter admits that Google's policy has changed since then.

"I guess they've realized this was a dumb policy, because under the current
rules what I did was totally fine."

~~~
onli
That's just about the process for a single off patch. Not claiming copyright
on what employees do in their own free time/before starting to work at the
company.

------
Pfhreak
This is the reason I left Amazon. Google has IARC, at least, which provides a
path for employees to retain copyright. Amazon has no such avenue, and they
furthermore restrict who you can work with -- want to make a game in your
spare time? You cannot do it with people who are not Amazon employees.

------
julianozen
One of the things I remember from my amazon employment is a similar draconian
policy which is also overbearing due to the fact that Amazon wants to sell
everything from all birds knock offs to scaleable databases.

One thing I thought was particular heavy handed was that the policy also
stated that in addition to general fears of amazon claiming ownership of your
project, if you needed some kind of cloud service, it _required_ you use AWS
for those services.

~~~
solidasparagus
It's less ridiculous than it sounds. AWS is super careful about not using
competing clouds - I think because if AWS employees use other clouds, it opens
AWS up to some sort of legal liability/claims of copying.

~~~
julianozen
Again, this is on a personal project.... Amazon shouldn't even have the right
to claim ownership of it, yet alone be concerned about the repercussions of
owning it

------
jeremysalwen
As a couple people mentioned on the twitter thread, it is possible to
negotiate this line out of your contract with Google (the one about relating
to google's business).

I did so with google, and also with apple.

------
throwaway713
Is California the only state in the U.S. where a company can not legally claim
ownership of your side projects as long as they do not relate to company
business?

I will eventually move out of the Bay Area, and this is my biggest concern for
a new job. Financially, I don't have enough saved up to just quit and work on
a startup for a year, but I also don't want my full time employer to own a
side project that ends up being successful. What is the best way to handle
this? How amenable are companies outside of California to negotiating away the
invention assignment clause?

------
Yizahi
"usbmuxd was rejected without an explanation. My follow-up email asking for
clarification was ignored."

Isn't it funny that Google employees themselves at least sometimes can taste
how other Google "products" feel when their accounts are banned, deleted and
there is zero ways to appeal such decisions?

~~~
TACIXAT
I think most Google employees are aware of that problem and wish there was a
better support structure in place. They aren't paid 300k per year to deal with
some random account request though, they are paid to write systems that deal
with one billion accounts, so there is not much opportunity there. Until the
tech giants hire massive support workforces, this isn't something engineers
can do anything about.

~~~
Yizahi
Well someone did wrote all those automated banhammer scripts, right? I don't
think DMCA requires automated ban system, Google invented it voluntarily.

~~~
marcan_42
Hey, I had nothing to do with Content ID. I was more worried with making sure
that all those times Google says it will let you delete your personal data
and/or anonymize it long-term, that they did and that whole system was working
properly. People love to say Google gobbles user data forever, but when
something was supposed to be deleted and wasn't, it was me and my team who got
woken up at 7AM.

People like to demonize large corporations, and Google has been going
downhill, but the vast, _vast_ majority of people working for Google are
trying to do good work. Big corporations have this uncanny ability to behave
worse and worse even when they're full of good people.

~~~
hinkley
Many years ago, thankfully, I was commenting to a coworker that a hallmark of
a good relationship is that the 'whole is greater than the sum of its parts',
but in a company without the right culture, that the whole is often far less
than the sum of its parts. And in the worst cases, the whole is worse than
_any_ of its parts. And this is how you get good people working together to do
bad things.

At the time, I felt that this _describes_ the phenomenon but didn't _excuse_
the phenomenon. And while I have a bit more of a 'shit happens' philosophy
today, I also still believe that 'the cost of freedom is eternal vigilance',
and so I'm not sure my opinion on that subject has really changed that much.
On the whole, I know that you can't foresee and prevent all problems. But, you
can judge people by how they react when the problems are identified.

Which is why I delete Google recruiters. Why I couldn't follow a mentor to
Ballmer's Microsoft when he asked. Why I declined the 'to hire' clause of the
contract-to-hire mobile company where I was making great headway defusing a
difficult lead engineer and a more difficult business unit (because every
penny they made was off of Dark UI patterns). And why the short contract my
company pushed me into at Amazon cost me politically.

We know the values we hold dear by the costs they incur. Not all of those
costs are readily apparent to others, and the Internet is always quick to
judge. But if they aren't apparent to _you_ , then it might be time for some
introspection.

------
anilakar
And at-will employment turns unenforceable laws into binding contracts. Sick.

------
nyxxie
Idiotic policy. Side projects are one of the best way to learn new skills
(they're the entire basis for my current skillset in this industry!). I often
find that I import lessons and technologies learned in my freetime to my day
job as opposed to stealing niche lessons from work. This fact basically makes
my side projects akin to ongoing training that my employers aren't paying for
but are reaping value from.

Not only is it unfair for these companies to leverage their power to try and
claim ownership over side projects, but they're actively shooting themselves
in the foot by discouraging a massive and free source of continuous education
for their employees.

------
TimPC
I've always thought the legal should be restricted to stuff you do in your job
for the company rather than stuff the company does. I think it's fair for a
company to say a person who does X for the company can't work on X in their
spare time for sufficiently restrictive X (e.x. a very specific domain of
expertise so not something broad like programming) where they might be
jeopardizing company IP or using trade secrets to write external code. I don't
think it makes sense for the company to be able to say that for everything the
company does even if you have no contact with it. This creates some edge cases
and challenges when the scope of your work changes but I think it's far fairer
to have to hand off projects at that point than it is to have to hand off
projects just for working at the company. It's a bit tricky because if a
company only tangentially lets you work on something you may want to do
projects to improve your expertise in that area without having to hand over
all rights to said projects to the company. There is a legitimate concern
about people doing near copies of their company work at home or withholding
ideas in their job in order to use those ideas in a personal project. The
current balance favors companies too strongly however.

------
rhacker
It's not a problem for small projects that you don't intend to do anything
interesting with. However it still sucks because you never know if some widget
library you create, even if you create in secret without your name on it,
suddenly makes a $1MM. What happens the name your name gets leaked that you
are the main project contributor. Will some lawyer at the companies you worked
on for the last 10 years be looking at monetizing your work?

------
mothsonasloth
TRWTF is doing the IARC process. The author should have just "failed" to
declare it.

Then when it came for the exit interview, not mention their side projects.

Keep calm and carry on.

------
hobo_mark
Speaking of which, is "20% time" still a thing at Google?

------
dehrmann
> usbmuxd (iPhone USB comms daemon)...was rejected without an explanation

This is development of a tool that helps a competitor's product. And it's not
like Android was a random side project no one knew about. This, and developing
an iOS app, are the border of doing work that's against Google's interests.

------
rla3rd
with online computing where is the line drawn for employee vs employer
equipment? lets say i have a personal aws account and i ssh into an ec2
instance, but use my employers laptop to access it to have the information
displayed. The same can also be said for a home computing resource. Who's also
paying for the electric for that equipment to be used? My employer provided
laptop wouldn't run if I didn't pay my personal electric bill. I think there's
likely a big gray area that hasn't been explored yet. I've not heard of any
cases where any of this comes into play.

------
kabdib
My current employer has a standard "you own anything you do in your spare
time, as long as it's not done on work equipment" clause in the contract.
Quite a few people here have side projects, discussion about them is open, and
the culture is that of respect for these people and the projects. I get the
impression that the company _likes_ people with the motivation and energy to
engage in side projects, and practically encourages them.

~~~
lioeters
It's admirable how your employer has the contract clause _excluding ownership_
of any work you do on your own time, on your own equipment. To me, that seems
like it should be the standard, common sense.

I noticed Dunbar's number (~150 people) is sometimes mentioned, to attempt to
explain how trust in relationships break down in large corporations.

I'm curious, may I ask roughly how big your employer is?

~~~
kabdib
It should definitely be the standard. I agree, it should not even be
worthwhile mentioning.

It was still refreshing to see.

We talk about Dunbar's number quite a bit, actually. We're about 2X that,
enough for several tribes.

~~~
lioeters
Thank you for answering. I just saw your profile - seeing where you work, I
feel a bit silly for so casually asking the question!

The topic of company ownership/copyright on employee side projects seem even
more relevant in the gaming industry, where - I imagine - there must be a lot
of code/library reuse, common patterns and concepts, where side projects could
easily overlap with products.

On one hand, I can see that from a management/legal perspective, it could be
difficult to justify the risk, especially as the company scales beyond tens or
hundreds of Dunbar-sized social groups.

My impression is that companies founded and managed by programmers tend to
have respect and trust for the work being done, with understanding that life-
long programmers (in contrast with those just doing it as a job) always have
side projects going on - and that such projects are perfect playgrounds for
learning, exploration of ideas, creativity and innovation.

------
lumberingjack
Do we not remember the famous story where Steve Jobs and Wozniak almost had to
give up Apple computers to Xerox? Some say that Xerox couldn't see the use of
a personal computer and how big that could be so their own stupidity let it
slide if they would have claimed wozniak's work apples computer never would
have existed.

~~~
enitihas
I think you meant HP. Wozniak didn't work at Xerox.

------
LatteLazy
People really have the knives out for Google at the moment (see also the
firing of people, monopoly allegations, the fake news "controversy"). They're
not perfect. But is there any major corporation that DOESN'T claim ip over
employee projects during their employment? Side or otherwise.

------
vjktyu
Does this clause have any teeth?

If I want to work on OSS in my spare time, I'll do so under a pseudonym and
won't bother to ask for permissions. If I choose to make a new AGPLv3 project
on GitHub, I'll just do so. And if some lawyers decide to nail me, good luck.

------
TrackerFF
So what's the solution / workaround?

I think it's best to be honest with your employer, but if they're gonna claim
stake at everything you write - well it sounds like a policy that eventually
drives enterprising employees to game the system.

------
muth02446
For reference, Google's IARC process is publicly documented here:

[https://opensource.google/docs/iarc/](https://opensource.google/docs/iarc/)

------
Lukesys
Google really is Hooli...

------
nurettin
>> And so I resolved to give zero shits from that point on about their IP
ownership policies, and did whatever I wanted in my spare time.

should have done that in the beginning.

------
ksec
I am late to this discussions not sure if I will get an answer.

How is that different to Company Policy not allowing you to have a 2nd Job?
i.e You can only have one Full Time Job.

------
danielovichdk
Don't sign a contract if you don't like its content. This can hardly come as a
surprise if it is started in the employees contract

------
meddlin
Cool, I won't work for Google. Probably ever if this crap keeps up.

------
chillly
"Don't be evil" is looking more and more hollow.

------
xibalba
The extremely simple and obvious solution is to just not work at Google. The
fact that people accept these agreements and then disingenuously rage against
them later is utterly baffling to me.

~~~
elicash
Not sure if you read the thread, but this person's agreement allowed them to
own their side projects.

Some issues are a problem across the industry. But also, more importantly,
some people like to solve problems in their workplaces and make them better.

~~~
xibalba
Indeed I did read the thread. The author's employment agreement specified that
the employee would submit to a process by which Google determines what of his
side work it will claim copyright on. To claim that the employment agreement
allows employees to own their side work free, clear, and without Google's
approval is simply not true.

People's greatest asset is themselves and their time. It is most effective to
deprive companies like Google of this asset (which is their lifeblood) as a
means of protest and a lever of change. But I do take your point. Frankly,
this thread just feels like whinging to me.

~~~
elicash
I think your response is a fair one, but the counter-argument I'd make to you
is that Google is _so powerful_ that if the employees were able to make a
change that the ripple effects throughout the industry would be tremendous.

As an individual, it's possible the biggest thing you can do alone is control
where you spend your time. But collectively, it's possible the biggest impact
of employees would be to change things on the job.

------
josemanuel
That's common practice for American companies.

------
petjuh
Were those side projects done during work hours or using Google's equipment?

~~~
Eikon
It's crazy that the "using X company equipment" legal basis works at all in
those disputes.

Most of the time, "equipment" seems to mean "laptop". IHMO when "equipment" is
such a commodity as a laptop, this should never even be an issue.

That's like a newspaper that would claims the work of one of it's journalist
who is writing books on his personal time on the basis that the book was
written with a pencil he brought home from work.

~~~
nullc
This is most easily resolved by simply not using a company laptop at any time.

One of the first pieces of advice I got when I joined a big tech company for
the first time was to just put the work provided laptop back in it's original
box and get my own.

This turns out to be pretty good from a number of angles-- you get an
emergency spare plus any kind of crazy bloat ware your job needs you already
have a sacrificial host to load it on.

~~~
romanows
You're just doing work on your personal laptop? That doesn't mean you own the
work you produce so I think it would complicate ownership of the non-work you
produce. Best to use the work laptop for work and the personal laptop for
personal stuff both for IP and company policy reasons.

~~~
nullc
> That doesn't mean you own the work you produce

Of course not, it does however eliminate a host of problems resulting from
using company equipment including additional complications from efforts you
would otherwise own except for using company equipment, or the extraordinarly
reduced right to privacy you have on company equipment.

Using separate equipment is also good, but isn't always realistic particularly
if your work requires frequent travel.

Obviously this only works out if your employer is okay with you using your own
system for work. Years ago almost all were, and I believe today outside of few
industries it's still commonly fine.

~~~
bilekas
I would be very surprised if the company didnt want control over the machine,
even from a securoty point of view, the idea of using your own hardward for
your job is just a red flag.

Don't do it. Also, dont use anything related to work for anything other than
work.. It's a tool for the job. Leave it at that.

~~~
ghaff
>the idea of using your own hardward for your job is just a red flag.

It's also extremely common. How many people these days carry separate work and
personal phones, for example? (Some do, of course, but I'm pretty sure they're
the exceptions.) And, especially anyone who travels a lot probably uses one
laptop a lot of the time too.

Is this "best practice"? Probably not. But it's convenient and it's usually
not an issue. (Though I fully agree that, if you know something is a
potentially borderline issue, it makes sense to wall personal and work off
more completely.)

------
ossworkerrights
It is time to deprive large corporations of the privilege of using open source
to generate profits based on people’s free work. It is high noon for saas
restrictive open source licenses. Spread the wealth along small indie devs.

------
vesche
Are we really at the point where we're using 100 tweets to write what should
be in a blog post?

~~~
teddyh
To have impact, ideas need to spread. Since most people don’t blog anymore,
they can’t reblog other people’s blog posts. But they _can_ retweet other
people’s tweets.

~~~
marcan_42
This, pretty much. I do have a blog, but 1) it's mildly more annoying to
update, 2) I have >30K Twitter followers, I assume maybe 5 people have my RSS
feed in a reader somewhere, and 3) I didn't actually expect it to turn out
this long, but I was already typing things up into the Twitter boxes, so
_shrug_ , and 4) Twitter seems to be the place for this sort of discussion
these days; my blog doesn't even have comments.

I'll use my blog for long technical posts though. Those make more sense there.

~~~
ghaff
Of course, you can/should link to the blog from Twitter. But clicking through
is still some friction so Twitter alone sort of substitutes for the one or two
paragraph blogpost "sketches" I used to write. (I preach creating a blog
version of longer threads but I don't really do it myself in practice.)

------
cauliflower99
Was his name Richard from 'Silicon Valley'?

------
Tomte
I'd be very wary to base my legal strategy on DeMorgan. Is it inconceivable
that a judge might rule that the intention is clear and a minor clerical error
doesn't matter?

~~~
marcan_42
I signed a contract, I didn't sign CA labor code which doesn't even apply
within the same continent and which the contract does not reference in any
way.

I'm pretty sure they can't claim they get to enforce what they _intended_ to
write just because I happened to _guess_ what that was by Googling parts of my
contract. What I signed is what I signed, and the wording was clear in the
contract.

~~~
TrickyRick
If someone asks you to bring wine or beer to a party, do you usually bring
both? Because that would still be valid in an OR statement but basing your
ordinary life decisions on boolean logic doesn't always work out like you
expect it.

If a contract is written as:

You own things you make on your own time unless you're using company equipment
provided: * The thing does not relate to company business * The thing does not
result from work you do for the company

It's pretty clear cut what this means and a judge would not care for boolean
logic. Of course it's hard to know for sure without knowing the exact wording
of the contract.

~~~
YawningAngel
Yes, I think that if someone asked me to bring "wine or beer" to a party,
literally everyone I know would be fine with me bringing a bit of both.

In fact, what would be weird would be someone objecting to my bringing both on
the grounds that they meant, but didn't say, "xor".

I don't think this contract is ambiguous in natural language. Or is generally
inclusive, and if you want xor you either write xor or use some cumbersome
circumlocution.

~~~
Retric
XOR is the natural use of or in English. Do you want to get subs or pizza? Are
you going to vote for A or B?

Logical OR is often written as ‘and or’. Do you want to see a movie _and or_
get dinner?
[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/And/or](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/And/or)

That said it’s not a universal standard and like most of English has wide
regional differences.

~~~
tomtomtom777
That or is not really a XOR becomes clear when you negate it. I don't want
subs or pizza. I am not going to vote for A or B.

I would say OR is the natural use, and exclusion is implied by the context in
these examples.

~~~
Retric
There are plenty of examples where A and B is treated as a negation of A or B.
“Do you want A or B? _Why not both?_ ” As one example from a popular mime.
[https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/why-not-both-why-dont-we-
have...](https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/why-not-both-why-dont-we-have-both)

------
hirako2000
The rational can't be entirely wrong. In tech, skills and ideas gained during
employment help generate new ideas. Since you are paid and trained, there is
this incentive to profit from everything you produce.

Companies use tricks such as 'coded on the corporate hardware', 'non compete
agreement' etc.

Grow some common sense, do all your side project strictly outside office
hours, on your own hardware, in domains that don't even remotely relate to
what your employer's industries , and it will be very hard for the emplying
organisation to come after you.

I could inspect everything my organisation does, how they do it, then bake
something up that technically outperforms it, then quit and work on marketing,
again Leveraging everything I've learned, their mistakes and success. Would
that be fair?

On the contrary, working for an optic company and developing oil drilling
optimisation methods to sell once in quit, would they even come after me? It's
fair, won't trigger any suspicion or even interest in pursuing litigation.

~~~
gmac
_in domains that don 't even remotely relate to what your employer's
industries_ is hard when your employer is as big and wide-ranging as Google.

