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.