On Tue, Aug 19, 2003 at 12:06:30AM -0500, Alex Malinovich wrote: > On Mon, 2003-08-18 at 23:19, Bijan Soleymani wrote: > > Of course there are. They protect the person from writing similar > > software but they don't allow them to use the code they've written for > > their employer without the employer's consent. > > There are some extremely restrictive, but hopefully unenforceable, > contract clauses out there which claim ownership of ALL code produced > while employed by that company, whether it's for company use or not. If > I happen to go home and contribute code to the Linux kernel one night > after work, my employer could now claim that Linux was infringing on its > intellectual property rights. Scary eh? Thankfully, I've never heard of > anyone even TRYING to enforce a clause such as this, much less succeed. > Though I have personally SEEN the clause on a number of occasions. Again this makes sense mostly if you're writing similar software. Imagine a SCO employee that would work on Linux at home, well that would give SCO some ammunition. I mean they could say this guy is looking at SCO code all day, slacks off at his work, goes and puts SCO money/code into Linux. It might not be true, but a court would fry the employee. You can apply this to any case where the employee is writing software in their spare time which is very similar to what they're doing at work. I gave the made up example of ebay employees starting a competing auction site in their spare time. I mean that's not just a copyright problem, that's an ethical problem. > p.s. This list goes to my primary mailbox, so no need to CC me on > replies. sorry about that... Won't happen again. I have this list filtered into a seperate box, so I do like it if people CC me, there are so many messages that I might miss otherwise miss a reply.
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