Re:The case for banning non-competes
by joshuamorton on Friday July 16, 2021 @12:46PM
(#27858175)
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...
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.