> If you're using melodies and samples from work hours, then maybe not.

That would not be a question of competition, but of IP theft.

> And it would be tough to argue that your at-home trading app code is completely uninfluenced by ideas you have at work.

How is that of any relevance? I can have ideas about a better way to wipe my ass at work, is my novel ass-wiping implement competing with the company?

And even if it were, mere competition should not be enough for NCCs to trigger. NCCs should be about unfair advantage owing to the exploitation of sensitive or confidential information.

This depends. You're drawing a very restricted form of noncompete, one which is that a noncompete is only valid if for example I walk away with, say information about customer priorities and take them to a competitor.

But there is a broader though still imo legitimate view that a company, paying a knowledge worker to solve a particular class of problems, has a right to the result of that work. An extreme example would be a company giving you a lab and research assistants, you working there a year and then parenting the results yourself and licensing them to a different company. It might not have required any insider info, and all the IP is ostensibly yours, but that feels abusive.

Granted we're overlapping into IP assignment and moonlighting clauses, but they're all closely related.

Well, if your company is in the ass-wiping business...

Even then I don't think so. Not unless the novel implement is straight up IP theft in which case… there's no need for an NCC, IP theft is already a crime.

> And it would be tough to argue that your at-home trading app code is completely uninfluenced by ideas you have at work.

And that your at-work trading app code would be influenced by ideas you have at home.

You're a craftsman making trading apps, some for an employer, some for yourself, it's what you do. It's strange for an employer to be allowed to force you to stop doing the others without compensating you for it.

There's a difference in competition and compensation between a craftsman who constructs products and an inventor who generates ideas. The problem is that the world is not black and white, there's a little of each in every career, and obviously companies want the best of both.

If you were a carpenter who worked in an old-time furniture store, turning chair legs on a duplicating lathe at work and turning toy spinning tops on a treadle lathe at home, there's no harm to your employer if you use some related skills at home. If you're not making parts that match their requirements, those parts are of no value to them. The company might as well pay you per unit, rather than hourly or as a salary.

If you worked at a think tank or research institution, your job might be to generate one particularly brilliant concept that was by itself worth your annual salary. You might spend your days testing ideas and improving your understanding of the problem domain while your subconscious mulls over everything at night. A musician is an interesting career in context - are they paid to move samples around in Pro Tools or think about and try a huge variety of riffs until they find the next Top 40 sound? If you had a great idea in your sleep, it was probably because you've taken a paycheck for the last 6 months at work generating no useful output, the only thing you built was the thought patterns in your brain. The company wants to own your brain, the thought patterns therein, and everything you think of.

Technology and automation is making ideas more scalable all the time, the industrial era where workers were paid to pull a lever repeatedly is in the past. I think we're only seeing the beginning of non-competes.

>And that your at-work trading app code would be influenced by ideas you have at home.

Which is an issue legally. Who owns the code? Who needs the license to use it?

This being an issue seems weird. Surely your employment contract could include an extremely permissive license grant to your employer for any code you've written that you use at work, regardless of whether you own it or they do. That's much less intrusive than a noncompete.

That seems like a strange clause I would want to include. I have (?) lines of code, as well as other IP. Why would hiring me for a year give them access to free license of all my IP?

I saw something in Theranos's employee contract about granting a perpetual license to all the patents of the employees. I have no idea why that would be reasonable.

The code that you used at work. If you make something outside work, and never actually use it in your employer's codebases, they don't get a license. Whatever you do use in your work at your employer, they do get a license to. Which seems fair IMO, and avoids the pitfall of "wait when did you write this and can we use it?"

I'd much prefer this to a noncompete.

I understand what you're saying. But again, it seems strange to me that previously existing code/patents/IP would default to the company if you were directed to include it. It doesn't avoid the pitfall you suggested, it moves it so that it now becomes "think about it every time you are asked to do something at work" instead of "one time while signing a contract"

And the Theranos contract had no such limitations (that I could see) of opting in to using it in the company. Just "we can use any of your patents you had at the time you worked here, thanks".

There is no protection for ideas, only for authorship.

So what you write at work is your work's, what you write elsewhere is not, by default.

> And that your at-work trading app code would be influenced by ideas you have at home.

Umm, but you are also taking money from your employer so you can't say that in reverse.

It just depends on your agreement with the company. There's no reason that by default they own everything you do, beyond the fact that business has normalized it (and many other practices with the magic words 'it's just business').

Umm, but your employer is also taking time from you so you definitely can say that in reverse.

In fact, your employer is taking your a fragment of your life, and human life is worth more than currency, so actually, it's really quite inappropriate if your employer was found accidentally using ideas that you had while you were in the shower at home when they weren't paying you. (internet you-can't-hear-my-voice disclaimer: this is obviously hyperbole meant to really drive home the point.)

I'm generally a fan of market-based methods of structuring economic activity, but this sort of implicit assertion that the owner of capital is just obviously more important than the owner of labor really puts the "ism" is Capitalism.

Labor is a market, and markets are determined by both the players and the rules under which the players compete. Companies use the force of law to coerce laborers (see: every other post in this tread where supposedly free people worry about being sued). It's completely fair game for labor-force participants to turn around are use that same force to coerce employers.

True, but you can’t use the studio’s IP regardless of whether you work for the studio.

Laws should be written to increase long-term production, and protect the weak. I do not see how this law does either. It's classic bullying.