The process to enforce such a statement in UK would be for the past employer to obtain a court injunction requesting a past employee stops working for competition. I was told almost all such injunction requests are declined as unreasonable. The only exception is if the statement was severely limited by geography. So for example if the contract says: "you can't work for competition in 5 mile radius" it may be enforceable, unless your whole home town is 10 miles across and the statement basically bans you from working in your profession where you live - then no court will grant an injunction like this.
So why did employers put that into their contracts if they knew it can't be enforced? I think they did it to discourage employees from going to competition. Finding out that it is unenforceable requires some googling and one may have doubts about their specific situation. I'm not sure how it is now. My experience with this is over 10 years old.
Having worked for one such company, who made a spectacle out of punishing disloyal former employees way past the point of what the legal system is built for (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18499712 ), and then holding staff meetings to announce how they've just destroyed that employees life (he wasn't the first, and while he actually did break the law, it's very Arguable the Quadrature guys did not), I took the safe choice sitting out my non compete period and took a nice long holiday.
I'll repeat the most important part of this story;
You don't have to be guilty to be dragged into court.
I'll repeat here what I said there. A lot of engineers cannot work on projects in their free time due to being locked into horrible contracts that assert copyright and ownership over anything they do in their free time. Which has a chilling effect on engineers who would otherwise contribute to FOSS. Even if those provisions are illegal, it still costs a lot of money to strike them down in court and the court system is generally always stacked in favor of the corporation.
I have gotten around this by having a list of side-projects I'm working on that give a brief description of what they are and that the business has no claim on them. I attach this to the contract/NDA as an addendum in order to protect myself. I have yet to have a company make a claim on anything I've ever put on the list.
As far as multi-year NDA's, I work in a state where these rarely if ever hold up. The only limitations in these is if you're going to work for a direct competitor. Which means if you're a Ford engineer and you're going to work for Chevy. Then the courts could ban you from working at Chevy for a few years, but your company can't keep you from being gainfully employed anywhere. If you're able to be employed as an engineer elsewhere, it will hold up in court. But trying to keep someone from working in their chosen field at another company doesn't go well in court.
I had one incident with a company who tried that and I took them to court. First day judge just laughed and told the company attorney that you can't legally keep someone from being gainfully employed just because you want to keep them from working at another company that also develops software. A few objections from the company's attorney got struck down immediately and I was out of there in a less than an hour.
Readers might be interested in this recent case in the UK Supreme Court regarding employee compensation for "outstanding benefits" from an employee's invention (Unilever made £24M selling it, he got his wage).
https://www.ipwatchdog.com/2019/10/28/uk-supreme-court-rules...
It frames the fact that employers claim ownership, and have for decades, but that UK IP law, at least, does something about that.
> And don't get me stared on clauses the survive the contract, including multi-year employment bans to competitors, etc. For a large multinational that basically mean you have to get a job landscaping or something because they compete with anybody would offer you a comparable job for your skills.
> This 'standard industry practice' should die.
Addressing things like these would be a good thing for a tech workers union to take up.
If you're a software engineer for Google, it's a pretty good hourly rate.
It's US imperialism, nothing less.
Your comment would be fine without that last bit.
>The Undersigned agrees that any inventions or ideas in whole or part conceived or made by the undersigned during or after the term of their relationship with $COMPANY [...] shall be considered part of the Confidential Information for purposes of this Agreement.
Basically saying they own everything I invent forever. I responded to them, basically saying this was ridiculous, and they said it's "generally implied" that this only applied to the context of the project, but they could amend it to make that explicit it if I wanted. I said yes, and after several weeks they sent us a revised version.
But I didn't have much of a choice in this; this project is a requirement to graduate. My friend, working with another company that also required an NDA, refused to sign it and basically fought with the school of engineering administration over it. He ended up finding a new project to work on by himself, on an open-source product, so it didn't require an NDA.
It says something like "on company equipment" and/or "reasonably related to skills/knowledge gained or applicable during employment with the company".
So I wouldn't quite quote this as being US imperialism. I seem to recall similar clauses in my previous contracts, but can't swear on it.
My take is the "skills/knowledge gained or applicable with the company bit": if its in my company's core market, then sure. If it's from training they paid for/provided (say - I don't know - Kotlin, if I didn't already know Kotlin) then OK.
But if I make a PHP/JS app, in my own time, in an unrelated market, then they can bite me for it. Obviously, in a more litigious environment, some people may not want to take that risk.
Let's imagine that you didn't know how to read and write before being employed at that company. If you learn how to read and write during your employment then the company owns rights to anything you write? And they own the rights to anything you make that requires reading too.
This clause essentially tells the employee to go out of their way not to learn anything new while employed at the company. Does the company, by chance, offer training in very broad skills to employees "free of charge"?
Seems pretty comparable
Many work contracts don't have clauses for inventions related to your field of employment because there's no ambiguity.
Most patches would not fall under the law, but entire libaries or novel approaches might. (basically anything patent-worthy)
In the EU all those laws are part of the statutory employment law /eu directives and not in an individuals contract - so employees don't ever know about that unless they know about employment law.
I'd really recommend all employees to read up at least on the generics of employment law. No need to read up on the edge cases, but the general law is pretty clear and not too long.
It will never get enforced unless there is some other conflict.
Worse being "your skills are to be used exclusively for the benefit of Employer". That means that you can't do freelance work, or open source contributions. In theory, you're not even permitted to fix your parents printer.
"Honey, can you take a look at why this script isn't compiling the shopping list correctly?"
"Sorry, my skills are to be used exclusively for the benefit of my employer."
Let people do nothing and they will do whatever they want. Let people do a little bit and they'll be scared out of doing any more, for fear of having that little bit taken away, or being made to look ungrateful for what they were allowed. Which is exactly what happened/is happening to me, when cdibona banned me from the corp processes, and now when tytso etc are saying I should've been thankful.
US copyright law is extremely friendly to individual creators at the expense of corporations. It makes corporations bend over backwards to avoid getting into a messy legal dispute with somebody that they've employed to create for them. This policy is so broad because if an individual Google employee were to try and claim that basically anything they came up with (including things that were, common sense dictates, done as work for Google) had been done on their own time, the burden of proof would be on Google to prove otherwise.
You must be joking! Yes, the "Work made for hire" requirements are convoluted, but most of the complexity applies only to independent contractors anyways. I have never heard of a US corporation be in danger because of an employee claiming copyright, yet people's personal projects and own companies constantly get screwed by former employers.
So apparently, companies do have to go through a few hoops to make their claim on their employees' IP airtight.
You're right, it's very easy for them to say "only work at work" but they don't want to do that, so instead, anything created by employees is their IP.
I work in Europe and every company I've ever worked for has had a substantially similar clause.
That's the way it is in Poland.
> In Germany the default for contracts is that you need your employers permission to do side projects.
You generally need to notify your employer if you take on a second (paid) job. The employer may veto that employment, but must specify a good reason (you can't be in competition, exceed the total legal working hours, bring ill repute to your employer, ...), but the default is "allow". Clauses that require approval are generally not enforceable. As always, there are exceptions depending on the exact circumstances. See for example this discussion (in german) https://www.haufe.de/personal/arbeitsrecht/top-thema-nebenbe...
You generally don't need permission to do open source work, though the ownership of inventions that qualify under the ArbnErfG may fall to the employer. As such, it's good to get clarification and explicit approval from your employer beforehands.
(not legal advice, ...)
German labor courts are most of the time well aware of the power imbalance between employer and employee. Even we, as a tiny company could bring more legal resources and funds to bear than most of our employees. So courts usually favor the employee.
Given that, I'd expect that the result would largely depend on how bad the infraction rates. If you failed to report a job that the employer could not have vetoed on any grounds, I'd generally expect a slap on the wrist (Abmahnung, "written warning") or such as the result. Worst case regular termination. On cases where the employee failed to report a side job that could or would have been vetoed, immediate termination with cause is possible - the link I posted above cites such a case. If the side job caused damages, suing for damages would be possible. However, suing for damages requires you to prove damages, which will be hard in many cases.
So I'd really recommend that as an employee you dutifully report when you plan to take on a second job - just be sure to phrase it as such: Don't make it a request. It's a notice.
Also, a second job is one thing. What about ownership of things you produce in your spare time? I don't think the former necessarily covers the latter.
The law is as the law is and the law is clear: Without good reason, no employer can forbid you taking on a second job. Now, employers pulling shenanigans in their employment contracts is not entirely uncommon - either due to lack of knowledge or trying to intimidate their employees. That's why it's good to know to have a general idea what the law says - because the law trumps the contract.
> What about ownership of things you produce in your spare time? I don't think the former necessarily covers the latter.
No, it doesn't. This is covered by the ArbnErfG (Gesetze über Arbeitnehmererfindungen) https://www.gesetze-im-internet.de/arbnerfg/index.html#BJNR0...
In a very short and inaccurate summary: Your employer can claim inventions that cross a certain threshold that are related to your work. You're entitled to compensation. Your employer can also claim a (nonexclusive) license for inventions that do not relate to your job, but relate to any of their areas of business under fair and reasonable terms (in doubt, a court gets to decide). You must notify your employer of any such invention.
Obviously, trade secrets or code that your employer owns the copyrights for is off limits for any of your spare time work.
If your second job leads to the total of your work taking up more than 48 hours per week, your employer can forbid it. Likewise if you work in your holidays.
I don't think it is as straightforward as you make it sound.
But funny how you choose to believe his personal experience, rather than mine. All hail the narrative.
These days I can do what I like and don't have to worry about any company interfering. This is a consequence of no longer being employed in any such field.
And it not copyright they "own" it - I suspect the tweeter is confused between intellectual property and copyright
Germany has this http://www.mondaq.com/germany/x/645260/Patent/Artificial+Int...) which is similar its probably EU countries relay on statutory law and don't explicity put it into the contract so you would never know
If it's illegal, it's void, isn't it? (Maybe Romania does it differently?)
EU law is fairly common across all states so there will be something like the "Masters and Servants" laws that US and UK law has.
It's how the law works so it applies automatically. It has to be the same type of work, though. But one example of that was a webdeveloper building a website for his local sports team.
https://www.faircompetitionlaw.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/1...
I don't really understand how people don't get offended at the idea of a company owning any work that you do. At that point you've lost your autonomy as a human being.
In the US. Problem is the US is infecting the rest of the world too, especially through subsidiaries which basically just translate from English the 'standard' employment contract.
I had to refuse employment in Romania since the clauses were so broad and basically illegal under Romanian law. (Of course, I had no interest in proving in court they were illegal but the contract was reviewed by an attorney on my side).
So, yeah, maybe apply some logic. If the employer owns your brain 24h/day maybe the hourly rate your are getting is not such a great deal.
And don't get me stared on clauses the survive the contract, including multi-year employment bans to competitors, etc. For a large multinational that basically mean you have to get a job landscaping or something because they compete with anybody would offer you a comparable job for your skills.
This 'standard industry practice' should die.