> Our Free Time is Our Own: Currently, if an employee makes anything creative in their free time, with their own resources, Hasbro may claim ownership. What we do in our free time should not be dictated by the company; neither should what we make in our free time be owned by the company.
How common is this in creative fields?
From my perspective this seems outlandish. Imagine doing FOSS work or a side project on your personal computer and your company tries to claim it. Odd...
A handful of states including California disallow this condition.
> have a clause that says that the employer owns everything you do while you’re working for them
Good companies will have a clause that says the employer owns everything you do in the relevant field of the company while working for them, explicitly naming that field.
If you work for a logistics company, you would be able to write your own video editor without any worry. If you work for a not-shitty company.
The common attitude of companies is that they’re paying for the whole of your life inside and outside of “work”, and these Unions are a response to that encroachment (and associated under-compensation in general).
Good on them. Best of luck negotiating a fair contract!
When someone is empowered to work remotely, and is salaried and not held to specific hours, then it's very hard to identify what work is "theirs" and what work is "the company's" in a legally consistent way. Yes, it's usually obvious from context, but context doesn't always carry to a court of law. It can be particularly messy because the kinds of open source projects one contributes to often overlap with the work they do in their day job.
So most companies which are salaried and allow WFH will usually ask employees to explicitly list any project they work on which they don't want owned by the company, with the expectation being that everything unlisted is owned by the company. It's a bit cumbersome, but generally the least bad option.
At our company we have a form to file if we do work outside of hours on OSS or pet projects, and to the best of my knowledge nobody has ever had their application denied.
edit: it's important because it's symmetric - not only does this define what _isn't_ property of the company, it defines what _is_. So if you come up with a clever solution to a problem for a company purpose and introduce it into an OSS project, it doesn't come back to haunt the company.
It's easy. Work done on company issued hardware belongs to the company. Everything else does not
Any halfway decent company will restrict in the contract to IP that's related to the company's area of business. If you write logistics software, the company will say "we own all logistics software you write". You can't create a competitor. But if you work for a logistics software company and decide to go write a video editor on your own time, the company wouldn't own that.
The problem is there's no clear legal definition of what "logistics software" is. A video editor is a seemingly obvious example of what is not, but what if you came up with a novel optimization technique which is not necessarily only applicable to logistics? Could you spin off that software into a separate business? What about something more fundamental, like tooling? Think about something like Slack, which was just meant to be an internal messaging tool created as part of the development of a video game. Imagine after Slack took off, that an employee claimed that because they had written Slack at least partly outside of working hours and it was not "video game software", the company didn't have ownership of the software.
This is why the common approach is that the company owns everything except anything explicitly carved out, it avoids ambiguities like this.
See also "anti-moonlighting" and "anti-social media" clauses. Hell, I've seen the odd story of folks being fired/disciplined for their dating profiles before. If the government doesn't tell them no, companies will take every inch they can get.
Whatever you do in your spare time is up to you and your employer has no saying over it, unless he can prove that it negatively impacts your job performance.
I feel like that's .. the reasonable take here? If you don't agree to their conditions, then .. just don't work there?
in practice that is either unenforceable or else a giant waste of the company's money, but it's CYA in case someone doing engineering or creative work decides to rip it off elsewhere.
like Meta ain't gonna try to steal your local cupcakes at the farmer's market side gig
That doesn't mean it is enforceable, though.
During the launch of Windows 8, Msft's moonlighting policy was also part of their Windows App Store strategy: we were all heavily encouraged to make an "Windows Store App-app" so that SteveB could claim MS had N-many apps in its app-store, because that's how Leadership thought they could build credibility vs. Apple's established app store (of course, what actually ended-up happening was hundreds of cr-apps that were just WebView-wrappers over live websites).
In contrast, I understand Apple might have the worst moonlighting policy: I'm told that unless you directly work on WebKit or Darwin then you have to deactivate your GitHub account or else find yourself swiftly dragged onto the proverbial Trash.
There is the famous lawsuit of Mattel suing Bratz, on the basis that the Bratz creator started to work on his new dolls while being employed by Mattel.
I'm not sure how it ended, but it wasn't dismissed right away and they spent years in court.
That's at least reasonable considering Bratz is a competitor.
If the Bratz creator started working on them while working for a company that made water filters, that would not be reasonable.
It’s called “broad assignment of IP.” Some jurisdictions disallow that clause.
And then of course there is the distinct but thematically similar anti-moonlighting clause.
Overreaching but common. Like most things, lawyers will take as much as they can possibly get.
