For your startup, it's not about if the courts will, after several months or even years, uphold your IP rights. It's about ever getting sued and game over.
For your startup, it's not about if the courts will, after several months or even years, uphold your IP rights. It's about ever getting sued and game over.
It seems like it wouldn't be that hard to hide enough in the way of resources (relationships, ideas) to get a good start on Act 2. You'd lose your office and a few months of salary, and need to find new investors, but this doesn't seem as severe as "game over".
It seems like 85% of startup time is figuring out what works and what doesn't, so you can "kill" the code (i.e. shunt it out of view, and then use it as a reference in a comprehensive rewrite, possibly in a different language so there's no doubt as to your new code being yours) and your cost is only the 15% of the time necessary to implement the ideas that you now know will work.
[quick legal advice: if a trick sounds too easy, it probably won't hold in court]
I don't know if this would work, having never had to do it, and it's extremely unlikely that I ever will, but then I'd hire someone to put severe pressure on decision-makers at the plantiff and make it very clear that they don't want to dance this way. Hiring a "pro negotiator" of this sort is expensive, but cheaper than losing a company, a livelihood, and having future wages garnished.
When legal action becomes unaffordable and favors the rich, people will resort to illegal action. And I don't fear death enough that I'd let someone disrespect me in such a way without taking his own fall.
[quick legal advice: if a trick sounds too easy, it probably won't hold in court]
This I doubt, given that the vast majority of white-collar crime never leads to an indictment, and the penalties are so minor relative to the rewards that it persists in spades. (This is not to say I'd advise white-collar crime, the vast majority of which is utterly unethical and dishonorable scumbaggery. I'm only saying that the vast majority of criminals in our society get away with it.)
Also, if your employer has IP over your idea/process/whatever, he will sue your next company as well.
Code can be re-written, and I'd argue that it absolutely should be in such a case.
And obviously, using company resources for the side project is both idiotic and unethical. I'm not talking about that. I'm talking about the case where someone writes something entirely on his own time and gets sued because of a coves-all-hours contract that effectively placed him in indentured servitude (and that shouldn't be allowed to exist in the first place).