It all depends on your specific case. When it comes to this type of law, there are no hard and fast rules (every contract and country/state is different). You need to talk to a lawyer.
-dain
On Monday, December 23, 2002, at 01:31 PM, Rhett Aultman wrote:
I know that I am not a lawyer and have only a semester of law to my name, but is there any real case law related to this matter? I could see where your employer could make claims against your private work if you were working on an open source project that was the spitting image of some proprietary work you were engaged in with said employer, but I would think that the claim would not be on the copyright of your own work but instead on divulging secrets or merely representing a conflict of interest.
If what you're saying is true...that anything I do in my spare time can become the copyright of my employer, then I need to seriously rethink my budding writing career, since the articles and books I am writing on my home computer could fall in a legal gray area. I honestly don't think that's the case, which leads me to suspect that your employer cannot just unilaterally annex work you do in your spare time unless they can cite a conflict of interests or some sort of other direct threat to their interests (such as stealing a trade secret).
Really...does anyone know a little of the case law here?
-----Original Message-----
From: Dave Neuer [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]]
Sent: Monday, December 23, 2002 2:05 PM
To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Subject: Re: [JBoss-dev] Good-bye II
--- Dain Sundstrom <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> Andy,
>
> Do you own your own work anymore?
>
This is actually a key issue that everyone working on
this type of projejct should really be aware of. If
you are a permanent employee of a company in the USofA
which produces copyrightable material (such as
software) --unless you have a contract to the contrary
-- that company owns the copyright to the work you do.
Not just the work you do on company time & equipment,
but often even the work you do from home on your spare
time.
IANAL, and my understanding is that the degree to
which the latter is the case MAY depend on how similar
the work you've done on your own time & equipment is
to the work you get paid to do, but since that's up to
a judge's discretion -- and case law, I guess -- it
would be insane for someone running an Open Source
project to knowingly allow questionable code into
their base as, LGPL, GPL or Bob's License, license
issues don't help you if some other entity can claim
to own the copyright. This is why the FSF asks people
to formally assign the copyright to free software
under the GNU project to them.
If Andy really does work for a company, as a regular
employee, who produces software similar to JBoss,
removing his code is the right thing to do even if
it's technically superior to every other bit of code
in the codebase and he's the sweetest human being that
ever lived, to protect the right of all of the rest of
us to use this awesome software.
Dave Neuer
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