Computers are just office equipment, just like pens.

If I gave you a pen and you wrote some story with it, then could I claim the rights to that story? I think not.

Exactly this, and they are ubiquitous. With software I think it might be a slightly different matter as the company mighy have access to software you couldn't otherwise afford. But it's a red flag anyways ... why would you ever want to work for someone who'd want to claim ownership to something that is clearly not theirs?

If you make that pen available to me under these conditions? Sure.

If you "just give" me something without any conditions then no, you could definitely not claim that story. But if you make that pen, your property, available to me explicitly only for work and nothing else?

It's your property, not mine. I only have whatever rights you grant me to it.

Only if you sign the contract!

You don’t get the pen without signing the contract.

You can’t sign the contract without the pen.

Let's make this example a little more extreme to show how nonsensical a company claim is on stuff they did not create (or pay for).

If I used the company computer to access a dating-website, then could the company claim ownership of my firstborn child, if that was in the contract?

> If I used the company computer to access a dating-website, then could the company claim ownership of my firstborn child

No, but first kiss is definitely on the table.

> If you make that pen available to me under these conditions? Sure.

Let's leave aside whether the law (in whatever country) permits such a one-sided contract, and ask - should it permit it? There are plenty of contract terms that are illegal (i.e. not backed by law), such as usury [1] or various anti-competitive practices, because their enforcement is seen as either unfair, or a detriment to society, regardless of whether they were entered freely. Contracts are not and should not be above the law.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usury#Usury_law

> because their enforcement is seen as either unfair, or a detriment to society

I mean, I do agree with you in general, its just that I do not see this issue as a detriment to society. If someone demands massive interest rates on loans that you need to survive thats definitely unethical.

A company demanding that you do not use their laptop so that you can work on your side projects at home ... well, that doesn't quite sound as bad. There is nothing stopping you from just buying your own device.

Thats like saying "only use the company car for work stuff" ... it just doesn't seem that unfair or unethical to me to be honest.

That's why they write it in contracts explicitly I guess?

Not everything in contracts is legally binding.

If I write code using some company computer, then the most they could do is charge me for the damages, i.e. the power used or in the worst case I would have to replace the computer.

Yeah, I'm not competent there. My impression is it should be enforceable, at least in the U.S., but I'd contact a lawyer if I wanted to know for sure.

Strangely it works this way though. It doesn’t make sense. In my current job I refused company equipment, and insisted on using my own. I pay for my own software too.

Safer that way.

If you explicitly included a contract that stated how the pen was to be used and the ramifications before my acceptance of your pen then yes.

Companies do include policies about how their equipment is to be used and for what and they do include how they think about ownership usually in your employment agreement or principles of employment policies. To write those off because “hey it’s only a generic piece of equipment” is perilous.

I suspect how you think about the analogy changes if you write the story on company letterhead or if you used the company car for your catering side hustle on the weekends.

This is usually a tax thing.

We have a policy that states, "company equipment can not be used for personal use". As without this company equipment can not be tax deductible. However, in the UK at least, it is a matter of economic policy whether a company makes any effort to in-force.

Thus I hit on what a I thought was a neat solution. Which was to deem it a sackable offence to expend any resource whatsoever including time or materials to identify if company property had been so used.

It's not that simple. The law recognizes that when signing a contract there is a power-imbalance between employer and employee. It would be different if the contract was written by the employee and signed by the employer.

That last paragraph of yours is key the your whole post. It’s a good illustration of how a large enough difference in degree becomes a difference in kind.

If you use the company car for a side hustle in catering, then that perhaps gives the company the right to fire you or charge you for damages. However, they do not get to claim any intellectual property (recipes you invented for your catering side-job).

I agree with that. In the pen example, they should bill you for the wear and tear on the pen (ball bearings and ink aren't free). In the computer example, same deal. Figure out what a flash memory erase cycle is worth, figure out what bringing the CPU out of its lowest power state costs per minute, figure out how many of each were used, and send an invoice!

I don't know whether you could or couldn't. But if I entered into such a contract, I'd obviously use a different pen, it's not that hard.

Is anyone really running their side businesses from their work laptops? That seems crazy to me.

I disagree. A vanilla MacBook might be a bit like a pen, but if that MacBook is loaded with a bunch of proprietary or licensed software, I can see why an organization wouldn’t want it being used for financial gain outside of the organization. Perhaps they don’t explicitly “lose” anything, but it’s their investment to have returns on.

If a laptop is like a pen, what about a high end graphics workstation? What about a small server? Internet bandwidth is a cheap commodity, can I run my site from work? Electricity is basically free (I charge my personal scooter at work), what about a small Bitcoin miner?

So you're the one who keeps taking the company's pens ...

More seriously though, there are frequently restictions of the use of office equipment (or business equipment in general). Businesses will often overlook it if it is not a problem, say if you need a photocopy of a rental contract. They have the discretion to say no if the privilege is being abused, say if you started printing hundreds of pages a month for personal use. The misuse of pens is rarely seen as an issue since they hold little intrinsic value and are routinely replaced.

Should they be able to claim the rights to something you produced with their equipment? In most cases, no. I'm not going to say in all cases no since there is always going to be someone who pushes the limits beyond reason. (Say a person develops a piece of software with a company computer to sell on the side. Can that be construed as the business indirectly financing the development of the software by providing hardware and/or software tools?)

In general, it is always a good idea to do personal stuff with personal equipment and business stuff with equipment supplied by the business. I'm sure the coworkers who are searching for the missing pens will thank you for doing so.

So now I have to lug around two of everything (laptop, phone etc) just because I might want to do something unrelated to work?

It is completely unreasonable as a blanket statement.

Three.

My employer's laptop, my client's laptop, and my personal laptop.

I enjoy HN for many reasons, one of which is to encounter approaches that I would not even consider. I would not use my employer's laptop for personal, let alone a side-gig purpose, with a 10 foot pole. It's not mine, I have no control of it, I have no visibility into what is being monitored nor how it is used, where the data goes, what I should install on it, etc. Employer has full legal right to request it back this evening.

Big +1 on that. I assume a model where my work laptop screen is being directly mirrored into a room with 100 people watching it 24x7, basically. Entirely impossible, but every organization has some level of monitoring between zero and my theoretical scenario, so I carry a personal device and completely sidestep the entire issue.

And I've setup everything from scratch. There is no software on there that I wouldn't install on my personal machine. If anyone wanted access to it they'd have to ask me for a password noone else knows.

Yes, it is perfectly reasonable and in many cases prudent to not use your companies laptop for home-use. So you may chose not to do it.

That the company would own everything you did on it is still completely unreasonable.

Not to negate your point, but a related pondering : I would assume that the Venn diagram of companies that make claim on property created on their laptops ; vs companies that let you install fresh OS and software from image and repository of your choice and access work network / store proprietary data ; is practically zero.

(If you did not install fresh OS from image of your choice, then you did not install software from scratch and should not be confident what's in your work laptop and what it's doing / monitoring)

Yes.

It's not your equipment, you didn't buy it, you can't just do whatever you want with it. It's like being given a company car but going on a 3,000-mile roadtrip "because why should I have my own car if you gave me this one?"

It's not remotely unreasonable to expect someone not to use their employer's equipment to make money on the side, especially for something like a laptop which over the course of what a developer earns in 4-5 years is basically nothing.

> It is completely unreasonable as a blanket statement.

I personally find your position unreasonable: that you should be entitled to use property that is not yours how you see fit, because it’s more convenient to you.

In reality, any sane organization wouldn’t punish you for reading the news on your work computer, but to assert you should be given access seems unreasonable to me. You’re paid to do a job and they provide some tools for you to use to complete that job.

Why not just buy a laptop and ask your employer to pay its depreciation? It's way easier for both parties I think.

Really you should use a dumb terminal and keep corporate and personal materials on separate machines.

If your company ever ends up in legal hot water, you’ll be glad you kept a physical separation between your personal affairs and work equipment. See for example the Enron emails, which were made public as part of discovery and include thousands of personal emails from people who used their work email as personal email.

Another wrinkle on "company property" you have to watch out for:

When I was in grad school, a professor in my department left to take a job at another university.

The beancounters demanded the return of the department-issued computer he'd had...in 1985.

Of course, that was many, many computers ago, and what almost certainly happened was that he'd transferred the machine to a grad student or whatever when he got a new one, and they'd just lost the record of the transfer (or never entered it in the first place). Still, he had to go through a week or so of back and forth before they were convinced that a) it was unreasonable to expect him to account for a computer from decades ago and b) even if he did still have the 1985 computer, it wouldn't be worth anything like their book value any more. They actually wanted to charge him the original 1985 price for the "missing" computer!

I guess the moral there is to keep your own careful log of what happens to any company property that's been issued to you.

When I worked in tech support at my University, we 100% knew we were never getting it back but had to ask like once a year anyway because government. Public money means excessive tracing for any asset!!