If a programmer is compensated for his time working for a company i think the company has a right to claim the work produced during that time. If they pursue it, is a different question, but i think Zenimax has a valid argument here.
The problem here is the standard of salaried work in the United States. Your job pays you a salary to do some tasks specified in a contract, with no hourly minimum or maximum. So let's say you have a hobby that closely intersects, but does not overlap with your tasks at work. You make something valuable in your spare time. Does it belong to your employer, or could they plausibly claim damages?
Your salary covers the work you produce while you are at work. If you pursue unrelated side projects in your spare time, I don't see how anyone with half a brain can reasonably claim that they also own those projects (partially or wholly).
I hear some US company make you sign off your right to write anything on your own. Meaning, you agree that any code you write belongs to them by default. Sometimes, this is even a problem for Open Source contributions.
Paul Graham himself warned about this: he basically said that if you're thinking about launching a startup and are currently employed, you shouldn't write a single line of code, if only to be safe.
This state of affair is obviously twisted and wrong, but in this world, corporations have more say than the people. Of course they will push in that direction.
Nobody has said that he was working on this while "at work" or not while shirking his salaried duties.
Imagine you're a chef. You design and cook menu items at your day job, then you go home and make pasta alfredo in your own way. You go to a new restaurant and you bring your pasta alfredo influence to it. Should restaurant 1 have any rights to the pasta alfredo you designed at home that was not even in use at their restaurant? Should restaurant 1 be able to charge you for making your pasta alfredo at home?
Obviously the big issue here is stealing code snippets or working on other products on the clock of another employer. But the blanket "anything you make while employed here at any capacity is ours" is just ridiculous and needs to go away.
Comments
If a programmer is compensated for his time working for a company i think the company has a right to claim the work produced during that time. If they pursue it, is a different question, but i think Zenimax has a valid argument here.
The problem here is the standard of salaried work in the United States. Your job pays you a salary to do some tasks specified in a contract, with no hourly minimum or maximum. So let's say you have a hobby that closely intersects, but does not overlap with your tasks at work. You make something valuable in your spare time. Does it belong to your employer, or could they plausibly claim damages?
Your salary covers the work you produce while you are at work. If you pursue unrelated side projects in your spare time, I don't see how anyone with half a brain can reasonably claim that they also own those projects (partially or wholly).
I hear some US company make you sign off your right to write anything on your own. Meaning, you agree that any code you write belongs to them by default. Sometimes, this is even a problem for Open Source contributions.
Paul Graham himself warned about this: he basically said that if you're thinking about launching a startup and are currently employed, you shouldn't write a single line of code, if only to be safe.
This state of affair is obviously twisted and wrong, but in this world, corporations have more say than the people. Of course they will push in that direction.
Nobody has said that he was working on this while "at work" or not while shirking his salaried duties.
Imagine you're a chef. You design and cook menu items at your day job, then you go home and make pasta alfredo in your own way. You go to a new restaurant and you bring your pasta alfredo influence to it. Should restaurant 1 have any rights to the pasta alfredo you designed at home that was not even in use at their restaurant? Should restaurant 1 be able to charge you for making your pasta alfredo at home?
Obviously the big issue here is stealing code snippets or working on other products on the clock of another employer. But the blanket "anything you make while employed here at any capacity is ours" is just ridiculous and needs to go away.
Maybe it can go away if everyone just ignored it? :P
For a company to claim 100% ownership seems unfair to me, %50 to the creator and %50 to the company, is reasonable, but totally unenforceable.