I would fully accept that and that's completely reasonable, but that's not what most contracts I've read say. I just read one the other day that stated the company owned all IP and inventions created prior to hiring and any created during employment regardless of whether or not it was written for the company or on company time. I'm surprised they didn't include any future IP as well.

> I just read one the other day that stated the company owned all IP and inventions created prior to hiring ...

Haha. Okay that's seriously ridiculous. I'd have a field day berating any org that tried to push that on me.

> ... and any created during employment regardless of whether or not it was written for the company or on company time.

I'd disagree with you on the non-company time. Depending on the nature of the work whether it happens on the clock or not isn't clear cut. Hence the default of the company owning everything while you're doing work for them as an employee.

The best defense for this as an employee is to get a written exemption for anything non-company related that you're working on, or a generic exemption as a matter of company policy for things like off-clock FOSS contributions.

Just about every large scale FOSS project requires contributors to attest to IP ownership and assign copyright of contributions. Most also explicitly ask if your employer has granted you permission to offer you contribution. There are many stories of projects that don't do this trying to track down individuals years after the fact to facilitate relicensing.

Now in a more specific work for hire (i.e. contracting / consulting) situation, it does need to be tightened to reflect the actual work at hand. Otherwise you can't work on anything else

> I'm surprised they didn't include any future IP as well.

Be even funnier if they did and also required to actually create some too. Instead of a golden parachute it'd be lead anchor.

>I'd disagree with you on the non-company time. Depending on the nature of the work whether it happens on the clock or not isn't clear cut. Hence the default of the company owning everything while you're doing work for them as an employee.

That's the real issue. Spolsky wrote up something on that a few years ago. It went along the lines of if you were being paid to create and build apps for a company and after hours you developed your own killer app but kept it for yourself, that wouldn't be fair to the company employing you to make great apps for them.

That makes sense. I also think any company that expects 100% of your IP during employment should pay you more than what they would pay someone to work 40 hours a week.

It doesn't make sense for niche software companies trying to take your IP for completely unrelated ideas that they would never use in their product line, particularly when you are working on your stuff after hours.

But this is where equity incentives serve to align these interests. If you develop a real killer app on your spare time, but integrated into your company's product would significantly increase the valuation, retention, reduce churn, etc - then with equity (whatever the structure may be) you have an incentive to bring that work to the table. If it's pure cash, then your benefit is the same regardless of if you keep this work (done on your own time, on your own equipment, and off-site) or share it.