UK law is pretty clear: if you are a contractor then you own everything you create, but if you are a salaried employee (”work for hire”) then your employer owns everything you create that’s related to the business.
If you write Perl for a bank they don’t own the songs you compose in the shower (they afe outside the ”scope of employment”.)
They probably own your money manager side project though. “Probably” here means, as always, “has a good chance of winning at tribunal” rather than any defensible logical meaning.
The default position might be something like that but anyone writing software professionally surely has explicit provisions in their employment contract that would take precedence (as long as they hold up to any legal challenge of course).
This is not a good analogy. A substantial chunk of the value of software is often the idea, not only the time worked on something. Ideas and inventions don’t happen on a schedule. Think of a chemist that is tasked with finding a way to synthesize a compound. He tries all day at work, and in the evening, on the couch, he’s struck by a bolt of enlightenment. Who does that idea belong to? German law would be pretty clear - to the company. And often, software is similar.
That only holds if the side-project is exactly what the company does, and even then it’s debatable: if a person is interested in problem X and has personal projects around X, and the company hires them because if that, do they really expect that person to stop being interested in X on a personal level?
It’s often sufficient if the general field of work matches, though to a varying degree.
> if a person is interested in problem X and has personal projects around X, and the company hires them because if that, do they really expect that person to stop being interested in X on a personal level?
This is exactly where you start entering a problematic grey area. The employer hired and pays the employee exactly to gain access and make use of that knowledge and interest and pays a wage exactly for that. And at the same time, the employee wants to continue working on their open source project, giving away exactly that knowledge for free, which potentially diminishes the value that the employer pays for. There’s a fundamental tension here which is difficult to resolve. Open communication helps, explicitly spelling out the boundaries as well. It’s impossible to tell from the tweet which side failed here to what degree, but getting a sign-off from management in edge cases is definitely a good idea.
That's a bizarre comment because the least protected thing here is the idea. This guy is free to get a new job and write a new library from scratch, or just tell his new company to do X + Y.
Also, of course, German law does not allow the US-style overarching IP clauses at all.
> This guy is free to get a new job and write a new library from scratch, or just tell his new company to do X + Y.
But that’s not what’s the issue at stake here. If I understand the tweet correctly, the code in question was written during the time of employment, though in their spare time. Depending on the exact situation, this could be problematic - for example if internal knowledge of the employer was used or if a profit motive enters the picture (sponsorship for the open source library, as in this case) Both would no longer be an issue if the code was written after employment ends, unless there’s an explicit noncompete in place.
I am just relaying information that I've paid money for multiple lawyers to explain to me in the past. If you think they are wrong, an explanation or counterexamples would be helpful.
Why do you believe that? There is specific wording that is customary to use in an employment contract in at least England and Wales (along the lines of "work done in the course of your employment") if that sort of agreement is intended. It would typically cover work done on employer time, using the employer's resources, or in a field related to working for the employer, and you have to be careful about how broadly the latter can be interpreted in the context of the rest of the contract.
It is also sadly not unusual for employers to seek IP rights to all creative work done by a salaried employee during their term of employment as an explicit provision of the employment contract. Most of us here might consider that abusive but it might remove ambiguity and put the employer on safer ground legally in the event of a later dispute, and lawyers gonna lawyer.
I have argued before that an employee should reject that kind of excessively broad term and if working in a creative industry like software development they should seriously consider whether they really want to work for that employer if the employer is unwilling to change to the more customary contractual agreement when it is challenged. But a lot of people just sign contracts without reading them and unfortunately OP may be in trouble here if that is what they did.
If the employment contract contains no IP clauses that make the agreement explicit then maybe the course of employment rule would be the default but this would be very unlikely for anyone working in a creative industry and OP's description suggests there is specific wording being cited in this case.
I am not a lawyer. The understanding above does come from discussing this issue with real lawyers in England more than once, but not since a few years ago. As always, get your legal advice from a real lawyer if it matters and not from some random HN comment.
>Most of us here might consider that abusive but it might remove ambiguity and put the employer on safer ground legally in the event of a later dispute, and lawyers gonna lawyer.
There's no "but" here. It's abusive. It's reflective of the poor negotiating position employees often have with their employers. This is why the clause usually goes away once you're in demand.
Lawyers make a convenient scapegoat to hide behind for all sorts of bullshit (second only to "it's standard, it's standard!") but they are a service and they do as they are instructed. It's naive to think otherwise.
This sounds lile really greay areas though. Can an employer claim the work of something done outside of work (as in paid) hours?
If the employer didn't retribute this time in the first place, can it be considered as being in the "course of the employment"?
This seems that if this kind of super generic statement will always go in the way of the employer, it would be a giant loophole to go any regulation on working hours.
In this specific case though we don't really know the details and maybe some of the work was done during working hours.
There might also be a clause in a salaried employee's contract that specifically requires them to notify the employer of any other work they are doing and get permission, precisely because otherwise the employer could end up in trouble under working time rules through no fault of their own.
As I understand it, this area can get very tricky because you have several general positions in law here that might be in conflict. For example, normally restraint of trade is not allowed, but there is also an implicit condition in any employment contract that the employee will properly serve their employer and that might include not doing other things that would interfere with their responsibilities as an employee. Then there is the whole question of whether work can be done off the clock for a salaried employee given there are limits on working hours and minimum wage requirements (though the latter probably won't be a relevant factor for anyone writing software). There have been related questions about people who are on call and they can get messy so it is not hard to imagine a case about IP rights getting messy with similar arguments being made by both sides.
Again, what OP needs here is a real employment lawyer. Without seeing the contract and other relevant information the most we can do is discuss the general issues, and even then and when this information all came from real lawyers, I am still cautious because my knowledge might be out of date or there might be other relevant factors we didn't discuss.
It's definitely something really complex. My contract does have a clause requiring me to notify them about side activities.
It's a small company and, from what I gathered when I discussed the contract with the founder back then, a lawyer advised him to add this clause to protect the company indeed.
My advise to any company that is thinking to do the same thing that this one did to this developer, if you're interested by the open source projects of one of your employee, sponsor it, give time to your employee to contribute in his/her working hours for example. You'll have a much better outcome.
Bumble would have to prove in court that the employee did the open source work on either company time or using company resources for this to hold.