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Comment by nmstoker | Hacker News Reader

My UK contract had no IP terms and after many years they tried to sneak them in via the employee handbook - I objected and we negotiated, ending up with a reasonable and amicable split: anything directly related to their line of business is theirs (whether in the office or not) but everything else is mine personally.

This seems the ideal balance as we each get what's valuable to us without overreaching (the original proposed terms would've covered literally everything including random stuff like books and video posts, which they didn't genuinely care about)

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Indeed, there are also some hidden advantages to contractor status, in that personal copyright implicitly remains your property until licensed to a firm.

An NDA can also have some nasty obfuscated golden-handcuff clauses. =3

Yeah. I think a lot of people who write these contracts (or work in HR) simply never consider the idea that people would create things outside of business hours. They don’t want to steal your fanfic or that song you’re writing or whatever. Just talk to them and make the contract look right.

It's a slog because at big companies anyone below a "department head" is not getting custom addendums added to their contract.

Depends on the company. I've had companies do this for me.

In one large company I won't name, the way we did it was to have someone with enough authority give me a statement in writing acknowledging that anything I made outside of business hours, using my own computing equipment wasn't owned by the company. That was good enough for me.

> anyone below a "department head" is not getting custom addendums added to their contract.

Nonsense. My wife negotiated modifications to her employment contract in her first job out of school. This included a diabolical adjustment to the non-compete clause that essentially made it worthless because it granted her the right to work so long as it was more than one mile away from one of the branch offices.

And since two of the branch offices were more than a mile from each other, that meant she could work anywhere, since any location, including in the same building as one of the branches, was at least a mile from a different branch.

I‘m currently trying to get a mechanism established at my employer where developers can (optionally and voluntary) show their „private projects“ and get an official statement that the company does not consider it company property. Parallel to how the company can release inventions it does not plan to patent.

It‘s not supposed to change any legal rules, but to document a usually silent agreement, if the employee wants that peace of mind. Obviously, nobody is under any obligation to show what they are doing in their private time, but especially when there can be a question if it is „too close“ to what the company is doing, it should be valuable to establish that line early and give the employee something tangible.

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