Hacker News Reader

Comment by josh33 | Hacker News Reader

So I have a friend (it could be true) considering starting a business on the side and he agrees with all of these points. After reading this article, however, he realized that he did sign some type of agreement saying anything he does is property of the company, even if it was at home. At the time he wondered whether this was normal, but as it was the standard company contract, he signed it.

How should he handle this situation?

View on HN

Talk to a lawyer familiar with those issues in your state. It depends on what he signed and your state's laws. No matter what, it's still best to disclose it to his employer, just like this article suggests and patio11 also suggests: http://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/03/20/running-a-software-busin...

These agreements are pretty normal. As others have already pointed out, suggest your friend talk to a lawyer. And don't sign any fresh agreements prior to that conversation.

Quite a few states have laws limiting the scope in both time and 'intellectual space' over which your employer may claim rights. In Washington (I'm not a lawyer, but I have recent experience with this), the law limits PIAAs to development using company resources, in the same or prospective market, and term of employment +6 months -- and burden of proof is on the employee. From what I researched at the time, this seemed to be about the middle of the road for employee-cum-entrepreneur legal protections. I'm not sure it matters in the end...if you can't afford to leave your job, can you really afford a legal battle with your behemoth ex-employer? The best way to avoid needing the legal protections is to be open, transparent, and avoid conflicts of interest.

Deleted comment

Sorry, but from a legal point of view, this is just really bad advice. There can be legal consequences, please consult with a lawyer about IP stuff, your employment contract and if they can later sue you for breach of contract etc. It really depends on your jurisdiction, though.

I know I shouldn't be reviving a deleted post, but I'm actually curious about how people get caught doing this (crediting an untethered co-founder for their work). It seems like, if you use resources that are unambiguously possessed by him, it would be impossible to prove that you wrote the code.

Simplified, I think it has to do with the burden of proof (may depend on jurisdiction). So your employer tells the court that he can prove (logs) that you developed some code at your workplace, then 'stole' that code, which is your employer's intellectual property, and went ahead with your own startup, doing suspiciously similar things. Now it's basically your problem of how to prove that it's not like that.

Depressing, but seems accurate. Only a corporatist society, flirting with fascism, would place burden-of-proof on the employee-- what ever happened to presumed innocence?-- but I guess that's what we've come to.

Don't get me wrong. I'd never advise anyone to write side-project code at work. In addition to being unethical, it's also patently idiotic. I'm talking about the case where someone gets up at 5:00 am to write the side-project code on his own resources and then gets sued because his former company decides to be a scumbag.

There's some validity in a company sueing an employee because they're not getting enough sleep to perform appropriately at work. However, this is normally cause for warnings + termination. It's unusual for a company to link this with potential unrealized income and therefore try and acquire ip.

There's some validity in a company sueing an employee because they're not getting enough sleep to perform appropriately at work.

First, no there isn't. You can fire someone because he's incompetent because he gets too little sleep to do his job, but suing is ridiculous. What if he just has insomnia?

Second, my assumption was that getting up at 5 am implied going to bed earlier. If you're sleeping 1 to 5 and have normal sleep needs, doing this for any length of time will ruin both the side project and the day job.

Most people would be more productive on their side project and at work if they got up at 5:00 am to pursue some kind of passion.

It doesn't really matter what proof you have. If your employer is suspicious and takes you to court, you've already lost. If you have tens of thousands of dollars to spend on legal fees in order to prove your point, then I guess this advice doesn't apply to you.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com