cdshaw@watmum.UUCP (Chris Shaw) (05/13/85)
**THIS IS NOT LEGAL ADVICE.. just what I remember** In cases where there is an "agreement" to limit one's rights in some form or other, if there is a statute in effect that guarantees that right, then the agreement is to no binding legal effect. Thus.. an agreement to be someone's slave is not a binding document. The obvious thing to do, then, is to try to have legislation enacted to ensure the rights of home hackers on home machines, notwithstanding any agreements with your employer about your employer's "intellectual rights". The other side to this is the situation where a nondisclosure agreement is desired by the company because of some trade secret or another that you would learn during employment. You could easily use the secret yourself by quitting and starting your own company (or sell it to the Russians). In this case, a company is (in some sense) within it rights to get after you because of "intellectual robbery". In the DEC example cited in previous postings, DEC is merely protecting itself in the easiest way; by preventing any and all of its employees from doing anything. DEC is only really guilty of using too large a scope in its agreement. What this all means is that we need a much better definition of "intellectual property", and some clear thinking is needed to make sure that no one's rights are damaged. Chris Shaw watmath!watmum!cdshaw University of Waterloo
pc@unisoft.UUCP (Paul Campbell) (05/17/85)
<munch> Just for information the California Labour Code Section 2870 reads as follows Article 3.5 Inventions Made by an Employee 2780. Any provision in an employment agreement which provides that an employee shall assign or offer to assign any of his other rights in an invention to his or her employer shall not apply to an invention for which no equipment, supplies, facility, or trade secret information of the employer was used and which was developed entirely on the employee's own time, and (a) which does not relate (1) to the business of the employer or (2) the the employer's actual or demonstrably anticipated research or development, or (b) which does not result from any work performed by the employee for the employer. Any provision which purports to apply to such an invention is to that extent against the public policy of this state and to that extent unenforcable. (Copied from my own employment agreement) Hopefully other states have similar statutes Paul Campbell ..!ucbvax!unisoft!paul
barmar@mit-eddie.UUCP (Barry Margolin) (05/20/85)
In article <461@unisoft.UUCP> pc@unisoft.UUCP (Paul Campbell) writes: > Just for information the California Labour Code Section 2870 reads as >follows > Article 3.5 Inventions Made by an Employee >... >and (a) which does not >relate (1) to the business of the employer >... OK, so that means that Honeywell can't demand that I turn over the copyright when I write a novel, since they aren't in the novel business. However, if I owned a computer and developed software for it and tried to sell it, they could easily maintain that it relates to their business as a software development company, even if they don't currently sell software for that particular computer. The point is that "the business of the employer" can be taken liberally or precisely; DEC may feel that it is software development, while the employee may think that it is software development on hardware manufactured by DEC. I suspect that the employee would lose the argument, as DEC probably has procedures for doing contract work on other manufacturers' machines in order to sell large, multi-vendor systems. I know that my employer, Honeywell, produces software for IBM-PC's (mostly for use along with our proprietary systems, but there are some general purpose PC products). Therefore, I doubt that I could sell PC software that I wrote at home (if I had a PC at home). -- Barry Margolin ARPA: barmar@MIT-Multics UUCP: ..!genrad!mit-eddie!barmar