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I always fight to have these clauses reworded in my favour. I'm always prepared to walk away if they don't. The one time I didn't get my way, the wording was very ambiguous, and I got their (okay, sufficiently narrow) interpretation in writing.

>Assume I have an "ordinary" contract in the USA. Would I need to worry about this if I wanted to write stuff on a blog, assuming it isn't directly related to work I do?

In the US it is going to depend on the company, but I feel safe in saying "most" companies don't care about such things and largely limit their interest to the work you do directly for them.

Some employers are quite strict, so avoid those (google, famously). Avoid even a hint of crossover with your employer’s business, use your own equipment and time, and work for a successful company that is too busy with its own customers. If some how you make a billion dollars (you won’t) it might be a problem. A million won’t even be noticed.

With the exception of Waymo going after Uber (which was a really unusual situation), when has Google gone after previous employees over IP?

The compromise way it generally works - there is a very broad 'Assignment of Inventions' agreement you sign as part of your employment and the employer makes it easy to add exemptions to it for your pterodactyl blog and Colossus Mark 2 open source emulator project. And that's it. The last thing anyone, including non-insane employers, wants is an after-the-fact dispute over IP rights, like the people in this story ended up in.

> And yet loads of people employed by companies work on open source software, write blogs, ... [snip] ... Is it something like companies legally may be able to assert ownership

For open source software and blogs, is it feasible to argue that they are a form of free speech thus cannot be owned (or in practice restricted accesses) by companies?

That is not how it works. The court might decide in favor of the employee, but if it does, it won't do it on free-speech grounds.

That's an interesting point. I actually talked to a lawyer at my company 6 months ago about contributing to FOSS and their answer was that my work may be owned by my company if I did the work on my own time outside of working hours and therefore wouldn't be mine to put under a free license in the first place. The lawyer declined to comment on what cases my work on a project may be owned by the company or not and said to fill out a conflict on interest form if I decided to work on a project.

What about free software that reimplements something you have worked on by day? Should be quite clearly the pro-employer interpretation and not free speech if the problem space is the employer's core business, but maybe debatable if it's just domain independent supporting infrastructure (someone already mentioned JS tables, surely not core business if your employer is e.g. a bank)

I think that this must be a quite common situation: someone works on a solution to a "supporting" problem (js table or whatever), feels that the approach taken might be worthy of being a clean, reusable library. Maybe the thought of publishing isn't even there yet, it would just be nice to have the the API cleaned up for reuse as an in-house library. But there's no corporate time for that. Next stop: clean room supplementation from memory for open sourcing. Feels innocuous, but has trouble written all over it, good luck with "free speech". And it's tragic, because the employer would most likely be the sole beneficiary of the cleaned up reimplementation.

Without these clauses Employers don't have a chance at getting the IP.

With these clauses there is at least the opening of a lawsuit. Most are probably not in a position to fight these lawsuits whether or not they'd win in the long run.