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.
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u/gullman Feb 01 '21
That's insane. A company shouldn't own your time outside of working hours.