My name is on a pile of US patents, all assigned to whomever employed me at the time that they were filed. It's always been a condition of employment that I would disclose inventions and cooperate with the filing of patent applications. And now there's a bunch of good ideas that I know are not being exploited for value by anybody. I feel as if I have somehow betrayed the scientific Enlightenment by doing my duty by my employers.
This is a big part of why I believe employment is not a good arrangement. They overreach because 90% of their workforce won't have anything worth stealing, so it becomes "standard policy" to require you to sign over rights most of your coworkers won't ever have a need to exercise.
At my last couple of jobs, I actually redlined the employment agreement and put an addendum that said that anything I work on away from work on my own hardware is mine. They all accepted it, sometimes with a little back and forth (and in one case three years in came back to me saying "we don't have your employment agreement" and starting the process over again).
There was only one place I didn't have to do that -- Netflix. It's part of their standard agreement. It even went one step further and said that even if you use their resources, if you do it on your own time you own it, as long as it's not in direct competition with their business. It was a refreshing change for sure.
> There was only one place I didn't have to do that -- Netflix. It's part of their standard agreement. It even went one step further and said that even if you use their resources, if you do it on your own time you own it, as long as it's not in direct competition with their business. It was a refreshing change for sure.
My current company has this exact policy. It's one of the many reasons I enjoy working there so much. :)
I am very interested, may I ask you to provide a reference to such a clause? Maybe when confronted with a real contract it would be better to ask a lawyer, but having seen an example would be useful nonetheless.
I blacked out all the parts that change based on the company, because I'm not sure how much I was allowed to share.
The list of inventions is basically and thing or idea you had that you might want to work on. It's a good place to list any open source projects as well as any ideas you might be working on for a company.
I don't think that's what the parent is saying. The companies aren't misappropriating his private-time work, merely they own the "work for hire" that he invented while he worked for them.
Turning it around, it would be pretty much untenable if employees could file their own parents on work-related inventions done on company time with company equipment.
It's not just invention clauses. It applies to all intellectual property, including copyright (at least in NL), as long as what you're producing in your own time is related to your job.
Exactly how far "related to your job" extends is up for debate. Because of that, I have an additional clause in my employment contract that specifically states that any contribution I write to FOSS projects is mine to license and distribute.
>> And now there's a bunch of good ideas that I know are not being exploited for value by anybody.
I feel your pain. It's bad enough that the company that holds the patent isn't using it, but you can't use it in future employment. I'll always have this nagging desire to just do it the easy/awesome way, but that's off limits now. The money they give to get a patent isn't worth the roadblock you create for yourself down the road.
I don't even feel like I can discuss some of the topics with other experts, for fear that I will share a solution that puts them at risk of infringement, accidental or otherwise.
I've discovered something for the company I worked for, wrote the patent draft and spent weeks trying to explain to the patent lawyers,who wrote the final version, how it worked. So I should have a good understanding of the topic, but yet, I honestly don't understand the granted version of the patent. It's total gibberish.
You are not alone, I also do not understand much of my patents after they've been lawyered up. I attribute it to a) them trying to change the language to be as broad as possible, while b) making it also deliberately hard to figure out what the damn thing is supposed to do in the first place.
One of the greatest crimes of recent history is allowing lawyers to write a document so confusing only their circle of lawyer buds can understand it. Much of the "legal" world is so obfuscated that ignorance SHOULD BE a valid excuse for breaking the law.
I read a (software) patent for a job I was working a few weeks ago. I stumbled on the patent when doing a broad google search on the topic. I had to read it carefully because of the way it was worded, but I will admit that I came away from reading the patent understanding a novel way to solve a problem that I hadn't considered before. It was the first patent I read all the way through, on a topic I didn't have much experience in. Granted, a single paragraph on a forum or blog could have communicated the idea just as well.
In no way am I defending the current state of IP or patent law in the US (on the contrary, I would prefer abolishing all patent law over the current system). However, it's definitely not impossible to learn things from patents.
I always renegotiated that clause in the contract to release all works under a free license (for me, usually GPL), but assign copyright to the corporation.
