
"Google asserts copyright, even on work I do in my own time." (Snap framework) - tianyicui
https://github.com/snapframework/snap-server/commit/5e4850d4cb74c75e706df509b90befc95263746a
======
cdibona
So, under California law, which is probably the most liberal in the United
States coving IP, you are prescribed from competing with your employer even on
your own time or on your own equipment. This is reinforced in industry
employment agreements, including Google's (my employer)

Most employers take the position that everything you do in the space is
logically competitive. Recognizing that, we, Google, make it very easy to get
permission to open source things, but under Google copyright.

We have a process for releasing under your own copyright, but it is not as
flexible. That said, we've cleared about 200 (75% of those requested) projects
in the last year for copyright release.

It's easy to get knee-jerk about this and get upset, but recognizing the
nature of IP in a company and acting on it is infinitely better than
pretending the problem doesn't exist and then, in the future, retroactively
claiming copyright when convenient. The latter leads to lawsuits and unfair
restraints on creativity and competition.

This system works. We've released 10s of millions of lines of code into
thousands of open source projects. It protects the employees and it protects
Google and the price is a bit of complexity and the odd thread like this.

Also, thanks to this system, Googlers can work on Google equipment and during
their 20% on these kinds of projects, which is clearly useful and recognizes
that people who work on open source almost universally do so without regard to
the machinery or network they use.

~~~
cookiecaper
Don't you think that this system is at least a little bit unfair? Why does
Google automatically get claim on work that has no relation to Google, done
without compensation from Google, and without any of Google's equipment or
facilities? How come these people need Google permission to assert a claim on
their own intellectual property that is entirely distinct from anything
involving Google? It sounds like this was established simply so that Google
can claim things that they have no real right to claim and misappropriate an
employee's work as convenient.

How come you can't just say "All work on Google-owned software is copyright
Google. All work directly assigned by Google management is copyright Google.
All work performed wholly independently and separate from Google by Google
employees is copyright its respective owners."? I don't get it.

~~~
state_machine
Because it's probably not actually "wholly independent".

Software developers are thought workers, and you don't get to just check your
brain at the door when you clock out like you could your tools or a laptop.
Thus, any similar* work you do on your own time cannot be done without your
brain using some of what is in your head, which you learned/figured out on
company time.

* Now, this is the fun part. Where do you draw the similar line?

Think about it: you hire someone to solve a problem. You pay them to figure it
out and implement. Then they turn around and implement the same solution,
which you paid them to think about, for someone else?

~~~
jules
This goes both ways. Things you learn on your own time benefit Google. So why
does the copyright only go one way? Why is Google entitled to things it didn't
pay for?

~~~
bugsy
I also wonder this regarding the Google Books settlement.

------
bphogan
This concept irritates me. You basically can't create things on your own if
you work for a company? I just completely disagree with these kind of no-
compete things.

That said, I also think it's silly to sign a contract that states this as a
condition of employment. I've walked away from a couple of consulting
opportunities in the past because of contracts like this, but gotten a few
others because I just politely asked if they would strike out that part of the
contract.

I understand wanting to protect your own intellectual property, but I think
it's sleazy to claim ownership of things people do on their own time. It's
right up there with "no competing with us for 2 years after we fire you"
clauses.

~~~
llimllib
My boss crossed off that section of his contract when he worked for Booz
Allen, and nobody made a peep.

~~~
foobarbazoo
I negotiated my contract with Apple; it had to go through legal and get VP-
level approval, but the changes were approved.

I doubt everyone can do this, though.

~~~
alexqgb
This suggests that a lot of this stuff is boilerplate. Often, it gets added to
contracts because there's no cost in doing so (except to the laywer's client).

At the same time, it's not necessarily part of a broader strategy to which the
company is firmly, if quietly committed, and which they'll stick to, even as
the costs of doing so escalate.

If the baseline cost of finding and hiring the right people is at all
significant, economizing by lowering resistance is a no-brainer. Just treat
this stuff like default settings from a useful, if not totally UX-savvy
provider of software, and don't raise any eyebrows unless you get unexpected
and seemingly arbitrary or mindless pushback.

------
lrm242
The boundaries between what's yours and what's the companies is usually
outlined by:

a) Did you do it on the company's time?

b) Did you use company equipment or resources to do it?

c) Does it pertain to the company's current or future business?

Item (c) is where the legal gray area shows up. It gives you enough leeway to
innovate on your own time with your own stuff but it also gives the company
the legal right to assert themselves if they feel you've strayed to close to
"company matters".

(c) is important because your employer can not control what's in your head. If
you work for a company that builds cars, they don't want you thinking of a
new, innovative way to build a car on your own time, leaving, patenting it,
and then competing with them.

This is entirely reasonable for both parties, IMO. In this particular case it
looks like the author has build a web server. This clearly falls within the
realm of what Google might consider their current or future business and
therefore can reasonably believe that the author is using Google knowledge
(even if not equipment, resourecs, or time) to build it.

EDIT: Clearly every IP agreement is different; however, every one I've ever
read or signed has essentially been the above. Further, there is always a
schedule allowing you to outline the IP you currently own that might violate
(c).

~~~
btilly
You are clearly not a lawyer, and I strongly advise people to not follow your
advice. I say this as a non-lawyer who has direct experience with this exact
situation.

What you have said is the case in California _only_. In most other states the
test is very, very different.

That said, there is a fairly simple process within Google which this guy can
use to get permission. While Google wants to assert its intellectual property
rights, Google also understands that it is usually good for everyone when
Google employees have the freedom to work on open source projects.

~~~
jrockway
_direct experience with this exact situation_

Relevant link: <http://www.perlmonks.org/index.pl?node_id=153046>

I think your case was tougher on you that these cases normally are. It seems
in your case, your options were, "get fired and lose code", "get yelled at and
lose code". In most cases where psychopaths are not involved, it's "can you
edit the copyright statement and run this by me again"?

I think that is why you are a lot more bitter than the person involved in the
linked article :)

~~~
btilly
Yeah, but it all worked out in the end.

I even got a weird kind of option grant from that company, which paid out to
the tune of 90K or so when the company was sold.

~~~
jrockway
The irony is that in this day and age of $3-per-month offshore VPN services,
you can say, "yeah, I won't contribute any code to open source projects" and
just start contributing under a pseudonym. Nobody will ever know. (Maybe I
already do this!)

------
how_gauche
Hello,

I see the righteous indignation engine is fully spinning up on my behalf. No
need: I can take care of myself, thanks. I posted this on the github thread,
but:

* Google has a slightly paperwork-heavy process I could have gone through to retain copyright on further contributions to this project

* I chose not to use it in lieu of using a paperwork-free process which involves me assigning copyright to _MY_ contributions under a Google copyright

* I am quite happy with this situation, from a de facto standpoint my day-to-day life is completely unaffected

* because the code is BSD-licensed and it REALLY doesn't matter.

...but if railing against the "man" is making you guys happy, then by all
means, continue?

~~~
jrockway
_because the code is BSD-licensed and it REALLY doesn't matter_

But now you can never change the license again, even if an error of wording is
discovered in the BSD license. You are stuck forever.

~~~
how_gauche
Yes, stuck forever, because there is absolutely no way I could pick up a
telephone and have a pleasant conversation with the person responsible for
making that decision. He lives in a cold granite tower guarded by dragons and
evil wizards. And snakes. Thousands of poisonous snakes.

~~~
cookiecaper
You might be able to do this for now, but you won't be able to when Oracle
buys Google.

~~~
how_gauche
Yes, when Oracle buys Google the absolutely bog-standard BSD license text
accompanying this open source project will spontaneously transmute into a
mystical poem written in ancient Aramaic. This poem, when read backwards, will
summon the demon Yog-Sothoth from the depths of Larry Ellison's underpants to
remove my right to use the code however I wish provided I retain the copyright
message and license text somewhere in the accompanying documentary materials.

Oh wait: no it won't.

~~~
jrockway
No, they'll just claim the software is patented, and that the BSD license
doesn't grant anyone a right to use the software.

(Hey, I wish we could live in a world where we could all write software and
not worry about copyrights and patents. But that, sadly, is not the world we
live in.)

~~~
zokier
They can do that already now.

------
AndyKelley
I just joined Amazon.com, and they explicitly state that they do NOT own work
done on my own time, unless that work is in direct competition with Amazon
itself:

"During the course of employment and at the termination thereof, the Employee
shall promptly disclose and deliver over to the Company, without additional
compensation, to the extent that such disclosure could reasonably be expected
to be of interest to the Company, in writing, or in such form and manner as
the Company may reasonably require, the following: ... any and all algorithms,
procedures or techniques related to the Company's business activities or to
the Employee's work with the Company, and the essential ideas and principles
underlying such algorithms, procedures or techniques, conceived, originated,
adapted, discovered, developed, acquired, evaluated, tested, or applied by the
Employee while employed by the Company, whether or not such algorithms,
procedures or techniques are embodied in a computer program...However, the
Company recognizes that the Employee may Conceive and/or Originate certain
Products and/or Services which are unrelated to the activities of the Company,
unrelated to the planned activities of the Company, and unrelated to any
reasonable extension of the activities or planned activities of the Company
("Unrelated Products and/or Services"). The parties therefore agree, the other
provisions of this Section 1 notwithstanding, that...any Unrelated Products
and/or Services Conceived and/or Originated by the Employee, even while
employed by the Company, shall not be considered Disclosure information..."

~~~
amock
The problem with this is that Amazon has so many businesses that almost
anything you do could be related the to company's business activities.

~~~
Silhouette
This is the problem with any generalised "anything you do that might one day
compete with the company" criterion. Even if an employer only claims work that
an employee does on their own time that relates to any current company
activities, there is still the need for an employee to know about the other
project, which is hardly likely in a huge company with 100,000s of staff
worldwide.

I think the standard _should_ be that things the employee does that are
directly related to their _own_ employment are what is covered. It's fair
enough for an employer to claim ideas directly related to the project you're
being paid to work on, and/or to say that you can't compete in closely related
fields to what you're doing for your employer. However, that's a very
different thing to counting effectively the _entire world_ of software
development, if anything that any part of a large software company does or
ever might do could be claimed.

------
dctoedt
1\. For _inventions,_ several U.S. states have law protecting employee's off-
duty rights in a manner somewhat similar to California. See:

Del. Code. Ann. 805 <http://delcode.delaware.gov/title19/c008/index.shtml>

765 Ill. Code 1060
[http://law.justia.com/illinois/codes/2005/chapter62/2238.htm...](http://law.justia.com/illinois/codes/2005/chapter62/2238.html)

Minn. Stat. 181.78 <https://www.revisor.mn.gov/statutes/?id=181.78>

N.C. Gen. Stat. 66-57.1 [http://law.onecle.com/north-carolina/66-commerce-and-
busines...](http://law.onecle.com/north-carolina/66-commerce-and-
business/66-57.1.html)

Wash. Rev. Code 49.44.140
<http://apps.leg.wa.gov/rcw/default.aspx?cite=49.44.140>

(This list is taken from a treatise on software law I published a number of
years back; more states may have enacted similar laws since then.)

\-------------

2\. For _copyright_ ownership, in the U.S., and I think in quite a few other
countries, a company's ownership of an employee's "work of authorship" would
depend on whether the work was either:

(i) a work made for hire, usually meaning created "within the scope of
employment" - <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Work_for_hire> ; or

(ii) assigned to the employer - which an employment contract might require the
employee to do.

~~~
bugsy
Thanks very much for those citations. I find it quite telling that three of
the States with this protection are California, Washington and North Carolina.
Pretty sure those are the top states in the US for software innovation. I can
see how the two are connected too. Employees retain rightful ownership of
their work they do at home for themselves. Many of these employees will then
leave and found new, innovative creative companies using the things they made
on their own dime using their own personal resources. In States where the
rights of people to the fruits of their labor are not respected, there is no
where near as much innovation, no where near as many new companies and
products and employment growth.

~~~
sparky
I think the high concentration of tech jobs and employee-favorable IP
ownership legislation are a great combination for the states you mention.
Causality could easily work either way here though. CA, WA, and NC are some of
the only states with enough tech companies and tech employees to care about
this stuff. Software has a much more favorable cost structure than most
industries; employees can easily fully implement their ideas on their own time
and their own dime. So it makes sense that these issues have come up enough
often enough in the legal system, or tech companies/employees have lobbied
hard enough, to fully flesh out the legislation on the matter in these states.

------
mtviewdave
In the state of California, Google does not have an absolute right to
ownership on all work done in your spare time. From California Labor Code
Section 2870:

[http://www.leginfo.ca.gov/cgi-
bin/displaycode?section=lab...](http://www.leginfo.ca.gov/cgi-
bin/displaycode?section=lab&group=02001-03000&file=2870-2872)

They can claim ownership if the work was done with the company's property, or
the work is related to the company's business. And courts in California have
generally held that the relation has to be pretty strong. So a software
company can't claim ownership on _all_ software products you create in your
spare time, just that which is "substantially similar" to what the company
does.

There was a Joel on Software discussion on this a while back:

[http://discuss.joelonsoftware.com/default.asp?biz.5.451795.2...](http://discuss.joelonsoftware.com/default.asp?biz.5.451795.20)

EDIT: The above is not legal advice. Corporate and worker rights vary by
country, and the U.S., by state. But I hope the above is informative to Google
engineers who work in California.

~~~
tianyicui
According to the author's blog: "Gregory David Collins is a Canadian software
engineer living in Zürich, Switzerland."

------
bugsy
For this comment, let's assume that Google is correct that it owns copyright
on all code he writes, even in his free time and not pertaining to his work at
Google.

Now, that presumed, when an author contributes to the project, they explicitly
agree to license their contributions under to the project's BSD license.

However, Google owns this code being contributed, and yet they, as a corporate
entity, have not consented to the licensing of their contributions being
distributed under the BSD license. Until they do, in writing, signed by the
corporate legal counsel, or whoever else is able to sign contracts on their
behalf, the code contributed is not BSD licensed because the author, which is
Google Inc, did not agree to it in writing, and thus distribution and use is
now a violation of Google's copyright since they did not legally consent to
have their code released. As the owner of the code, Google alone can consent
to its use, and not the "code slave resource" who happened to produce it,
whose very soul Google now contractually owns.

This could be a problem for the project.

In general, projects need to require that anyone contributing new code
represent that they alone are the owners of the copyright to the new code
being contributed. If you contribute code owned by someone else and not
explicitly licensed in a compatible manner by that other entity, then you have
code in the project that presents a serious legal liability.

~~~
cdibona
But in this case, we released the code , under Google Copyright, into a BSD
project and under a BSD license.

~~~
bugsy
It's not clear who is 'we'? Do you (plural) have the legal right to sign
contracts and take out bank loans on Google's behalf? If so, yes, you
represent Google legally as the official legal representative and this is all
cool. The code should just have a link to the signed document placing the code
under BSD.

~~~
cdibona
So contracts and bank loans take a higher strata of employees to approve, but
I've been given authority on open source matters. It's not practical to have a
signed document on file with every project, but we do have such documents on
file with the FSF, Apache and many other projects.

It's not always practical to do these docs, but they are out there.

This is one of the great things about open source, through the use of real ,
trusted open source licenses, we state our corporate intention quite clearly,
and then we don't need to have a huge load of paper that accompanies every
project.

We don't , for instance, have paperwork clearing the ip on all the projects we
use at Google. The linux kernel alone is a huge work of shared copyright. No
paper....

~~~
bugsy
OK, in a previous comment you said 'Google (my employer) ... cleared about 200
(75% of those requested) projects in the last year for copyright release'. Now
you are not the guy that this article is about, or are you? Who released the
projects? "Google released" means someone else there at Google, as opposed to
"I, as a representative of Google, released 200 projects".

Now, many posts later, you are saying "we released" and "I've been given the
authority" as if you were the one authorized to "release the copyright".

But previously you said someone else did. Did you get the authority in the
time between the two comments? Who are you? Who at Google can verify that you
have the authority to release Google code? What documentation of this is
there? You say no paperwork is necessary? Is there an official list somewhere
of which code Google legal/corporate has released? How does your term
"copyright release" differ from placing something under a open source license?
Usually 'releasing' copyright means placing something in the public domain.
Are you using the common usage when you use the term "release". What about the
25% not 'released'? Did any of those represent code that had already been
placed by the coder in a outside project? Were they informed afterwords to
remove the code?

Here we have a coder who is contributing to a project who says the author of
the code for copyright purposes is Google Incorporated. But he is not the
legal representative of Google. What legal authority does he have to transfer
ownership or determine contractual licensing terms of code owned by Google on
their behalf? If he does have this authority, or it has been granted him by
you or someone else, it has to be in writing or it means nothing. Yet you are
saying it doesn't have to be documented anywhere?

Maybe this is authorized by the appropriate people at Google. Maybe not.
Without any documentation of it, there's no legal bias for saying this ©
Google code is BSD licensed.

~~~
rryan
From Wikipedia:

"Chris DiBona (born October 1971) is the open source and public sector
engineering manager at Google. His team oversees license compliance and
supports the open source developer community through programs such as the
Google Summer of Code and through the release of open source software projects
and patches on Google Code. In the public sector space, he looks after Google
Moderator and the polling locations API."

Based on how authoritatively Chris DiBona is speaking, he is effectively
representing Google in these comments and in the GitHub comments. He hasn't
disclaimed this at all, and his position at Google would suggest he has the
authority to make these statements.

~~~
bugsy
Thanks, that's all I'm asking.

And all I'm bringing up in my comment that led to this subthread is that when
someone contributes code to an open source project and that person does not
personally own the code themselves or have the legal authority to transfer
license, then there is a serious legal issue involved that have to be taken
very seriously.

With my own open source projects, people contributing need to be able to grant
license on all the code they contribute. If someone came in with code owned by
their employer with their employer's copyright on it and not their own, it
would be absolutely critical to verify that their employer knew about it and
cleared the licensing for that specific code in writing, or from some very
public facing repository on the company website with explicit documentation
about the license. Any sort of 'well it should be OK I think' or 'they told me
it was all right' would raise red flags and require much more explicit
permission.

It will be interesting now to see what the reaction of other contributors will
be to the new policy that some animals are more equal than others. I have had
no problem contributing to open source and having my contributions listed as
"copyright by various contributors". But once one contributor gets his own
name separated out in the code headers, then I want my own name in all those
code headers as well, and I wouldn't be surprised if others would want the
same as well.

~~~
how_gauche
Re: your ridiculous "some animals are more equal than others" claptrap: the
reason I gave Google its own line in the license file rather than adding it to
CONTRIBUTORS like all of the other copyright holders (myself included) is
because Google is not actually a code author, it is a legal entity which
happens to own copyright to some of the contributions made by one of the
contributors.

The English-language text reads:

Copyright (c) 2009, Snap Framework authors (see CONTRIBUTORS)

Copyright (c) 2010, Google, Inc.

Putting Google in the contributors file would be inaccurate because that list
is for _people_ who have put code into the project. It is a difference in
categorization and essentially I am saying "the copyright to this code is
owned by these people and this corporation".

~~~
alextingle
You are confused. By writing down Google's name rather than your own after the
copyright symbol, you are saying that _they_ contributed the work to the
project. You are the author, and may have associated moral rights (such as the
right to be identified as the author), but it's not your code. It's their
code, and they've done the contributing. All you got is the pay check you were
going to get anyway.

~~~
rryan
Actually, no. Contribution and copyright are two different things. In the
United States, every word you write is copyright by you. However, you can
assign your copy rights to another entity. This allows copyright and
authorship to become disjoint, even though they start out as the same thing.

Here is an example: The Apache Software Foundation requires copyright
assignment on all contributed work. Developers who contribute code must assign
their copyrights to the ASF. Their name is still in the contributor list,
because they are a contributor of code. However, the Apache Software
Foundation is the sole copyright holder of the works.

------
dstein
I've seen this type of situation blow up pretty badly. Coworker started a
side-project, quit company, side-project becomes _really_ successful, and the
company sued the ex-employee. Legally the situation was perhaps iffy (they
ended up settling out of court), but it left a bad enough impression on me
that I ended up leaving the company soon after, on moral grounds. I just could
not work for a company that thinks they own my brain, and I will never do so
again.

~~~
cdibona
So this is really the only proper response. If you work for a company in the
US or in Europe, they have claim to your creativity and work. If you don't
like it, work for yourself. (see my post above for how we deal with it at
Google)

~~~
jrockway
They have a claim that they can waive. Everywhere I've worked except
Doubleclick (bought by Google, incidentally), has done this.

------
kragen
My own point of view is that of course it's unjust if employers are able to
claim copyright on work that their employees wrote outside of work hours
without using company equipment (see e.g. <http://unixguru.com/>), and that
everyone reading this thread should work to reform your state or country's
laws so that they are more like California's in this matter, but even
California's law isn't as ironclad a protection as explicit agreement on
Google's part, because I'm sure there's some way snap-server could be
construed to relate to Google's business.

It would be better if Google simply quitclaimed any copyright interest in
snap-server over to Gregory, but of course that would even cover stuff he does
at work, and it makes sense that there's an approval process for that.

------
bhickey
My employer is sensible about this issue.

Everyone files an IP declaration enumerating the projects that are or may
become relevant to the company's business. Since this determination is made at
their sole discretion, I threw the kitchen sink at it and wrote down
everything.

From the date of that declaration, they have a 90 day period in which they
have an exclusive option to negotiate to buy. I am obliged to negotiate in
good faith, but I am not obliged to sell. After that window, the option goes
up in smoke.

~~~
dhimes
I'm impressed by that. I've never heard of such freedom, but it strikes me
that since so many people are considering startups now that such an agreement
may be a competitive advantage by which companies can compete for employees.

If I'm reading you right you make this declaration when you are hired. What
happens if you start a project while you are (already) at the company?

~~~
bhickey
I've only been here for a month, and the policy has already been revised since
I arrived! The 90-day timeout is new. I'm happy with it. If I got a new idea
project idea that wasn't tied to alpha capture systems, I don't think there
would be any issue with amending my declaration.

Before my time, there was an expansive policy that asserted ownership over
everything. The old policy might not have even been enforceable in the UK.
Some employees raised concerns about it, management responded. The company is
small (~60 employees/~25 devs), so there tends to be a lot of flexibility.

------
eplanit
I worked for IBM years ago. I remember signing their IP contract on the day I
started work, while my manager explained to me "it doesn't matter if you're
vacationing on the moon -- if you invent something while there, it's ours".

~~~
iWhatever
Yes, on your first day at IBM you were given the opportunity to declare IP
that you owned. Anything else going forward belonged to Big Blue.

~~~
markchristian
Not true in California -- they can only assert copyright claims on anything
you build using company-owned property. So, if you did it your own time, on
your own hardware, you can actually fight back against this.

~~~
dhimes
Such was also true in the 1980s (I was advised- never tested it in court).
Whether a signed agreement was enforceable was pretty much a state issue, but
it was generally thought that they were hard to enforce (like non-compete
agreements).

------
lukevdp
This is from the author on that link:

"Holy crap. The situation is quite simple:

pre-existing work I contributed to this project remains under my copyright

contributions other people make to this project remain under their own
copyrights

contributions I make to this project subsequent to November 2010 are under
Google copyright

nobody should really give a shit about this because a) I freely agreed to this
even though Google has a process where I could have asked to retain my own
copyright because b) the code is BSD licensed and you can use it however you
like regardless of who owns the copyright.

The only thing this would potentially make more difficult for me is if I
wanted to re-license the code under some other terms. But I would have to
obtain permission from our other contributors to do that anyways."

Seems reasonable

------
tptacek
Not a weird Google thing. Very typical IP contract term.

~~~
pingswept
It might be typical amongst large companies, but it's more extreme than the
three IP agreements I've signed, and several others that I've heard of. It
would take a very extreme incentive to make me sign an agreement that took all
the output of my mind.

~~~
tptacek
What are the agreements you've signed? The boilerplate agreement I've seen,
over and over, take anything related in any way to the company's business no
matter when you build it, modulo a list of specific things you enumerate
before taking the job.

~~~
pingswept
The agreements I've signed have been part of the contracts at the 3
engineering/design firms I've worked at: mindtribe.com, ideo.com, and
greenmountainengineering.com. (I've also worked a few other places, but they
were schools and an environmental foundation.) Actually, now that I think of
it, the most aggressive agreement I've signed was when I was working as a
researcher at a university robotics lab.

In all cases, the agreements had the list of exceptions you mentioned, but
they only took ownership of stuff I thought of while I was on the clock. At
the last company I worked for, the agreement was very contentious-- the
employees lobbied for, and eventually received, an agreement that allowed them
to own not only their off-the-clock ideas, but also their on-the-clock ideas
if the company didn't develop them within 6 months. (There were more details,
but that's the rough idea.)

At the time, I thought this was a big deal. In retrospect, I think all that
stuff is just people making stuff up about what is going to happen in an
imaginary future where ideas are worth millions and lawyers are free. All the
same, I still refuse to sign agreements like that-- I think it distorts the
way innovation actually works. As it's said, we're all standing on the
shoulders of giants; I don't want to be under the control of someone who
doesn't understand that.

------
jellicle
If there's one lesson to learn here:

When you are joining a new company, review the agreement. If you see a non-
compete clause for post-employment time periods, cross it out. If you don't
see some verbiage that explicitly makes clear the company doesn't own anything
you do on your own time and with your own equipment, add it in.

If Google is hiring "A" employees, how come they aren't bright enough to add
such a clause to their employment agreement?

------
comice
What else of Google's employees stuff do Google get to own? If they get into
debt, does Google share that too?

~~~
runningdogx
And, as johnl asked in the github thread, does Google hold copyright on
Chris's comments here on HN?

Code, comments... they're both speech. If you can sign away code copyright in
an employment contract, can you also sign away copyright to all human language
speech you write?

------
te_platt
There are two sides to this issue, neither of which are unfair. The employer
hires people to solve problems in a given space and has a right to make sure
they own what they paid for. On the other side the problem space doesn't
(shouldn't) include everything. The better defined the problem space the fewer
problems you will have. I've been on both sides of the issue and found that
people are willing to accept both sides. The last few places I worked
management was willing to change the standard contract from the normal "we own
all unless you get an exception" to "we own all related directly to this
specific project or done on company time/equipment". If your employer is
unwilling to make the change and you are unwilling to work somewhere else
consider part of the cost of working.

------
tyn
The only case where this could be acceptable is when you work in the R & D
dept. of a company. If you are hired for specific tasks (which is usually the
case) then everything else you do should belong to you, only. Einstein
produced most of the work that led to the relativity theory while he was an
employee of a patent office. Should the patent office claim anything related
to his work in physics? It would be really absurd, if it did.

------
jimmyjazz14
I glad to see everyone is finally giving a shit about a Haskell project!

------
mgkimsal
I've seen a number of employer agreements indicating that they own everything
that you do, whether on the clock or not.

Would those companies want to have ownership/copyright assigned to everything
I do automatically, even if I created child pornography, or created some IP-
violating software, or broke some US-export restrictions? It seems a pretty
_dangerous_ position to take - "we own everything you do" - which assumes that
everything I do is legal/safe in the first place.

------
wlangstroth
Even though I'm certain no comment of mine precipitated this wild
overreaction, I'd still like to make it clear that I never intended to
encourage anything but academic discussion among Snap developers when I
responded to Greg's comment on github.

cdibona's candid description of the situation certainly does not warrant a
Marxist interpretation.

------
zokier
I think the copyright statement is just plain wrong currently. It should say
"Copyright (c) 2010, Google, Inc. and Snap Framework authors (see
CONTRIBUTORS)". Google owns only the parts made by Google employees, other
parts are still owned by their respective authors.

------
protomyth
I do wonder how many open source / free software projects have code
contributed to them that is actually owned by Google (or some other
corporation) and will it come back to bite anyone?

~~~
cdibona
See above. Since we clear employees for open source work, we can generally say
that Google contributions into opens source are reviewed and okay.

~~~
protomyth
Yeah, but this points to someone who didn't get clearance so I wonder if it is
a unique case. Also, I am actually thinking of some other companies. Thinking
about it further, some projects want copyright assignment, so one wonders if
some of those weren't done properly.

~~~
cdibona
Actually, he did get clearance, that's not immediately apparant from his
thread, but he was granted permission to release code into the Snap Framework
under Google's copyright and an open source license.

------
jimmyjazz14
I'm a little curious as to what legal rights (if any) a copyright holder has
over a BSD licensed work. Anyone care to weigh in on this?

~~~
how_gauche
In the case of a single author, the copyright holder has all the same rights
he/she used to have (including to re-license under a proprietary or different
open source license), except the right to revoke the open-source license
already granted to people who have obtained the source.

In the case of multiple authors, the legal rights of any one contributor are
significantly curtailed. Unless they vote with unanimity, the license cannot
easily be changed: contributor X has licensed her code to contributors Y and Z
(and everyone else) under BSD licensing terms, and it cannot be relicensed
without her consent unless her contribution is completely excised from the
project.

Even then, the waters can become murky because most code cannot just be
deleted from a project, other code grows organically into and around it, so
the line between what constitutes a "derivative work" and what doesn't can
become really blurry.

------
MoreMoschops
Am I the only person who thinks he wasn't being serious, and is now just
seeing how long he can keep a straight face?

------
linuxhansl
Nope not by California law. Work you do in your own time on your own hardware
is yours. Period.

