As another commenter pointed out the situation in Germany is not significantly better; I can vouch that France also has many areas of weirdness when it comes to those matters. Companies - specifically their legal teams - are incentivized and have every reason to be greedy about what comes out of their employees' brains.

I suspect it's not an insignificant factor in California being disproportionately represented when it comes to invention and innovation over the last half century or so.