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Comment by mutatio | Hacker News Reader

"If I work on machine learning at my day job, it should be fine to ask for patent rights on any ML related work I do outside of it, but asking for copyright ownership of a video game I make on the side is absurd." – James Liu

I don't understand the reasoning, why is it OK to hand over patent rights for work done outside of contractually defined hours simply if it's the same discipline? Hard to reconcile.

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> why is it OK to hand over patent rights for work done outside of contractually defined hours simply if it's the same discipline?

This is always naturally in contention because if you don't also constrain scope of work an employee can work in competition with their day job "on their own time" based on information they wouldn't have if they weren't employed by the company.

So this isn't supposed to cover random side projects, but should cover you creating a competitor, or related patents, etc. "off hours". Some companies legal departments just try and claim everything because it's easier.

The way I've seen this done well is some sort of internal review and/or disclosure mechanism.

On the other hand, if employees are so uninterested in their collective success at the company they are employed at, hasn't the employer already failed?

I've had two really good employers in my life, and I would never even have had the idea of competing with that company because working there was great so why would I try to make it worse by competing? It was/is in my own interest to not compete.

If an employer feels the need to have that clause, they should fix the problem at the source: become a better employer so that the employees have no reason to compete.

Eh. The principal-agent problem can't be disposed of so easily as that.

There's no amount of compensation and excellent work environment which can provide enough upside to make founding a whole company pointless. Better expected value because of lower risk? Absolutely. But not total potential upside.

I say that as someone working his dream job, who can't imagine trading out for mere money. But I can imagine leaving to found something, though I have no intention to do so.

And the converse: if someone has that a strong desire to found something that happens to be similar to what they're currently working on, do you really want them to stick around only for a contract clause, when their heart's no longer in that work?

Wouldn't it be far superior to be able to have an open conversation with them about it?

(I also object to the premise: a desire to found something doesn't show up in a vacuum. There's something else that founding something brings (independence, permission to try ideas, small chance at wild stacks of money, whatever) and many of these should be negotiable also at your current employer.

Any good long-term organisation has a few crazy projects that just might turn out to be the next best thing. Let this person "found" one of those, in house and with freedom but full support of the rest of the organisation?)

I feel the same way as you, but contracts don't exist for the "happy path". I'm sure many people are invested in the success of their employer, but not all are.

Internal reviews / disclosure mechanisms sound a bit dark to me, the power balance is unhinged. Imagine having a novel idea outside of work, putting some effort in at the weekends, only for your employer to absorb the idea because you naively disclosed it. I can't see any benefit to this system at all for the employee.

In my experience these reviews are not technically detailed, so much as about scope. The closer what you want to do is to what your company does, the more detailed the discussion is likely to be.

> I can't see any benefit to this system at all for the employee.

The real benefit to an employee is to have on paper agreement that they can proceed with a project without fear that the company will claim it later.

I suppose it could be done terribly, but my limited personal experience (on both sides) it's been fine.

If you're there to develop novel machine learning tools, and you sit there thinking about machine learning tools all day, then go home, publish it, and take the patent for yourself, that's a bit much.

Well they provided the environment for you to think, but that gives them the right to own your thoughts? It's possible, and even common in universities for the organization to have the right to use but not own your discoveries. If that makes a business non-viable, it's really not our problem.

If I pay you to invent something, and you invent it, I expect to get it. I'm not paying you for the privilege of inviting you to my office. I'm paying you for the output of specific thoughts you have.

It's cool I get to repost this twice in a row:

"Very cool and healthy that people on this website instinctively imagine themselves as the boss of random commenters on a website."

Cute, but just a weak sort of ad hom deflection. But while you're down there go clean the toilets.

Where do you draw the line, is the context as generic as "AI" or "ML", implying that anything AI related, even if not directly comparable to your employers product is owned by the employer?

I mean I would personally say it's anything directly in the employer's lines of business with a fairly limited scope. But as personal advice I wouldn't recommend others to do anything with AI on the side, with the intention to own it, if they work in AI as a career.

I find your last sentence troubling, all the cost is on the individual.

I agree with the sentiment of the first sentence, if we simply say the blast radius is the the product(s) level you're working on.

It is. Employer reach is too far. And yet, having some reach is still very reasonable.

> all the cost is on the individual

And all the salary too. I really don't see the issue.

This is incorrect both de facto and de jure. Anything you invent while employed at a university or a company like IBM or Microsoft will belong to them forever, without exception.

The cardinal rule is that, if you do not want your invention to belong to your employer, don't work for them.

All of the sour grapes about these arrangements are indictments of working for someone else, and I wholeheartedly agree! If you have the least bit of cojones, make something people want and sell it yourself. But, if you prefer the golden yoke, the owner of the farm gets all the fruits.

That can be the case, but depends on circumstances. The point I was making is likely to hold up in court even without a specific contract clause in place to address it.

Because otherwise someone will say that they invented a new algorithm for ML based on their ML effort at work but it was really solved at home on their personal computer. What happens if you come up with an idea while walking back from the bathroom to your home office related to your day job during business hours? Is that during work or outside of work?

I think it is ridiculous to claim things unrelated to your active job assignments. Making a board game as a hobby is unrelated and non-competing to deriving a new ML solver.

Many employment agreements don’t really define hours. If the boundaries are fuzzy that makes it difficult to determine what happened as part of the employment and what did not.

So deciding that work within a specific discipline should be considered part of the employment unless explicitly exempted can be a practical way to avoid 9-5.

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