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Comment by dadkins | Hacker News Reader

> no contractor is going to know how Google's search infrastructure or ranking algorithm works, but a former employee will.

Ironically, the moment said employee becomes former, Google no longer has claim to any work they do. What's at issue here is the extent of their claims on /current/ employees.

> but anything you think of relating to the company's business belongs to the company.

A company can own /ideas/? Copyrights, yes. Patents, yes. But ideas? Not so much.

Even the idea that the company has a blanket claim to anything you set to keyboard or paper outside of the office seems ludicrous and unenforceable. Write a song? Google owns it. Write a poem? Google's. So why would they essentially get a blanket claim to any program you write?

edit: What's protecting Google's secret ranking algorithms is confidentiality, not copyright.

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Along the lines of the company's business. Google is a software company in many markets. They can make a reasonable case that any software is along the lines of the company's business. They probably wouldn't win all of them, but it's sufficiently gray that the courts would have to get involved to figure out precisely where the line is, and no employee (or employer, for that matter) wants a lawsuit.

I have friends that work in publishing and journalism, and they have similar problems with their blogs. Their employers don't own any software that they write on their free time, but personal blogs are a gray-enough area that most stick to writing on their employers' official blogs.

Same reason that the DragonLance series is Copyright TSR. Tracy and Laura Hickman dreamed it up on the way to a job interview there, and then the plot and characters were developed while they were employed by the company.

As far as owning ideas - technically, yes, to the extent that those ideas are "reduced to practice". A company can't own what's in your head. But if you write it down, it's technically Copyright (c) 2010, Your Employer.

What if you write a song about Google's business? If an employee of Google writes a song about working on a search engine, does Google own that?

I think that it's silly to presume that a company should own something just because it's the same class of work. Does a newspaper own the diaries or private correspondence of its writers? Why should it own the personal blog? If the work is produced without compensation from the company and without using any company tools or resources, how can anyone make an argument that the company "owns" it just because the originator is employed there?

I can see how non-competes might be enforced to upbraid the release or participation of employees or ex-employees in businesses thought damaging to the employer. But that just gives the employer respite until the term of your non-compete agreement runs out; thereafter, all works should still be owned by their original author, and he is free to do as he pleases. You shouldn't be able just to steal that work without regard to the employee.

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