Contractual ownership of ideas and products

[Jim Choate <ravage@ssz.com>]

Forwarded message:

> Date: Sun, 19 Oct 1997 10:58:11 -0600
> From: TruthMonger <tm@dev.null>
> Subject: GAT & GAB

>   Anyone notice the court ruling in regard to the company that sued
> to retrieve information that was inside an employee's head, claiming
> that his employment agreement made *all* of his ideas the property
> of the company.
>   Anyone notice that the Thought Judge ruled that the Thought Laws
> required the individual to divulge said ideas, or be imprisoned by
> the Thought Police?

IBM has such a non-disclosure agreement that apparently signs over to them
any and all work I may do while employeed by them.

Fortunately I had other pre-existing agreements and when I signed the paper
as a function of employment I added a proviso that I had a consultancy as
well as pre-existing non-disclosures that limited their rights to my work
to only that performed while on-the-clock. Two years later they have never
contacted me regarding this so I assume they accepted it. I know of another
engineer here who said that such proviso's didn't apply to him because he
was under pre-existing contracts with the government (in various ways) that
prevented that sort of contract with him. They didn't refuse him employment
either...

Contracts are contracts, if you don't like a part of it then mark it out and
put your own proviso's in their. If they accept it, by paying you wages for
work, then you are pretty much done with such broad intellectual property
issues.

That's the nice thing about contracts, as a signatory you have a right to
review and modify the contract. Use that right.


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