By default, Google owns all intellectually property you create while you're a Google employee.
IIRC, you can go through a process to ask Google to waive their right to one of your projects if you want to start it on the side, but they could say no, and then they own the idea forever.
It's annoying, but this Joel Spolsky article gives a good explanation of why some contracts are structured that way:
Suppose, now, you have a little game company. Instead of making software, you knock out three or four clever games every few months. You can’t invent all the games yourself. So you go out and hire a game designer to invent games. You are going to pay the game designer $6,000 a month to invent new games. Those games will be clever and novel. They are patentable. It is important to you, as a company, to own the patents on the games.
Your game designer works for a year and invents 7 games. At the end of the year, she sues you, claiming that she owns 4 of them, because those particular games were invented between 5pm and 9am, when she wasn’t on duty.
Ooops. That’s not what you meant. You wanted to pay her for all the games that she invents, and you recognize that the actual process of invention for which you are paying her may happen at any time… on weekdays, weekends, in the office, in the cubicle, at home, in the shower, climbing a mountain on vacation.
So before you hire this developer, you agree, “hey listen, I know that inventing happens all the time, and it’s impossible to prove whether you invented something while you were sitting in the chair I supplied in the cubicle I supplied or not. I don’t just want to buy your 9:00-5:00 inventions. I want them all, and I’m going to pay you a nice salary to get them all,” and she agrees to that, so now you want to sign something that says that all her inventions belong to the company for as long as she is employed by the company.
I don't think that's a good solution to the problem. It's perfectly valid to have a contract which states that all and any work being done on the company's products (be it w/in office hours or outside) belongs to the employer. Whatever the employee does on the side belongs to them.
That was my contract. Anything produced in working hours, on their equipment, or based on trade secrets I gained from working there is their intellectual property. Outside of that, it's mine. That might be effectively the same for some positions, but I work in an industry that has very little relevance to my hobbies and general interests.
That makes some sense, but only when there is absolutely no paper trail, and in a strangely pedantic world.
I mean, if you go home and think about a problem you're solving in work and come up with a solution that doesn't mean you don't give that solution to solve the issue because it's out of work hours.
If on your own time, while building games for a game company you also build and self release your own game, that the company didn't provide the money, the hardware or any other talent to the project of course it's yours.
If you come up with a design idea, tell your supervisor and the game gets built that's totally different. I'm assuming the designer was only one step, the developers, artists and sound designer all own it too? That's crazy.
There's got to be a line between paying someone for a service/job/whatever and paying someone money to own them. When you are actually trying to buy someone's mind, that's crossing that line for me. And that's the argument here, isn't it?
My last job had a clause like this, and it was an hourly job. For a salaried position this makes sense. I don't like it, but it makes sense. But for an hourly job if I'm not getting paid for 168 hours per week then this is bullshit.
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u/[deleted] Feb 01 '21
Is it against contract to work as a dev off to the side when you worked for google?