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Comment by dsego | Hacker News Reader

It's his tool, why give it away for free?

Well, I mean, generally, any tools you create on company time, with company resources, are assigned to the company, if you're an employee.

Only if the contract says so. And just because the contract says so doesn't mean it's morally correct, only that they managed to get you to sign it.

I'm pretty sure that's not true – in the UK at least, any work created during a course of employment belongs to the employer. There's nothing in the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act that explicitly defines what 'course of employment' means but a court would certainly consider it valid were the works produced on company time using company equipment.

If you offer to automate something and the employer says "no, don't mess with our system; it works for us", then automating it behind their backs might not be a work for hire even though it's clearly work-related. This even sounds like the author was being treated more like an independent contractor than an employee.

That's not true in the US either.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Work_for_hire

Software is specifically exempted from that.

Yes, they may have rights to this script. But he probably doesn't owe them any documentation and certainly not training or maintenance. Depending on situation, he may still be able to get something from it and probably he should if they didn't want him to automate that and didn't pay him a real programmer's salary.

I don't know what the correct morality is here, but I know that a basic principle of morality is to use the same yardstick for everybody.

Companies, specially big consulting companies do something similar to their clients all the time when inflating projects and time, but, somehow, that just sound like business as usual.

Or are they just including indirect costs? The secretary doesn't work on the project, but she has to be paid. The consulting company also must allow for time/cost overruns. All these costs have to come out of the estimated costs, so including them is not only ethical, it is necessary to remain a viable business.

Practically speaking, how is he going to turn it around and sell it if he has no legal right to do so?

OK, but if you have a job as a software developer you almost certainly signed such an agreement.

The default rule for what happens w/o a contract is different for each state. But many states say that a work, created during employment, that is within the scope of your work and on company time is company property. Note, this doesn't apply to contractors.

I can't think of a state where a program you create to automate your job, that you wrote on company time, wouldn't be the companies property. Of course an employment contract can easily modify the general rule.

For contractors the rule is the opposite. They retain IP by default.

If you are hired as a software engineer, yes, the systems you develop as part of your job belong to the company.

If someone hires you to cut the grass, and you create a machine that does it (the "Yardba"(tm)), there's no reason that machine would belong to the employer - creating it was not a part of your job.

No, this depends entirely on your employment contract. (Though I do agree that presumably a groundskeeper would not have intellectual property clauses in their employment contract) I've worked for two companies and they had different clauses; one said something to the effect that they owned any IP in their business interest (regardless of whether it was created on company time or company equipment); the other was narrower and said that they owned IP created outside of work only if it was dependent on company confidential information.

because the ip belongs to the company because presumably he developed it during working hours using the company's resources.

Only if the contract says so. Since it wasn't a development job, there's a chance that clause isn't there.

This is not my understanding at all. In the USA employers own the work of their employees if that work is related to the employer's business which this clearly is.

No clause or contract is required for this to be the case. It's the default state. It might be different in other countries but I doubt it.

Employees have a "duty of loyalty". https://www.google.com/search?q=employee+duty+of+loyalty

That would seem to include things like this issue. It also includes not competing with your employer.

If that were the case, they wouldn't need those clauses inserted into contracts.

The idea of any kind of "duty of loyalty" is absolutely laughable in this day and age. Employers have long since rejected any sense of having loyalty to their employees.

Also, if you're going to link to something, at least link to the Wikipedia article on it. Linking to a Google search is pretty dickish.

Linking to google wasn't meant to be dickish. Wikipedia's article on the topic is sorely lacking and rather than pick some random law firm's blog I thought it was best to just link to google so people could easily read several different people's perspective on the topic.

here's one for California 2016

http://blogs.orrick.com/trade-secrets-watch/2016/01/19/the-d...

How is this his tool if he made it at work, on his employer's dime?

maybe he made it during his recreational / non working time ..

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