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Your Boss Owns Your Brain
Posted by James Grimmelmann on Wednesday, June 30 @ 18:13:06 EDT
Contributed by Anonymous
Contracts
Anonymous writes "A Texas appeals court has decided that a computer programmer's former employer owns the thoughts inside his head. The court decided that an idea for a computer program that did not yet work, and that the programmer, Evan Brown, had been working on since college, was covered by an invention disclosure agreement that the company made Brown sign after he had started working for the company.

The court's opinion ignored prior decisions stating that continued at-will employment cannot constitute consideration for an employment agreement and found that the company's decision not to fire Brown created a unilateral contract that bound Brown to its provisions.

The upshot, for all you coding types, is to document, document, document. If you're working on a project independently of your job, make sure you document the fact that you're doing so off company time!"

 
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Re: Your Boss Owns Your Brain (Score: 0)
by Anonymous on Thursday, July 01 @ 00:27:19 EDT
As an alternative to "document, document, document", steer clear of employment in the Kafkaesque field of computing and technology. Find a nice, honest job, free of the machinations of this increasingly unsavoury industry, and code as a hobby. Satisfaction is more readily found down that path.


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I remember this from YEARS ago (Score: 0)
by Anonymous on Friday, July 02 @ 03:49:35 EDT
Ok, so this is the appeal. It doesn't look like the judge took too long or much thought in considering it. And the original trial was concluded in summary judgement. So what took so long?

(It is horrific to see how casually important arguments are thrown away and how steeply inbalanced appeals are. Absolutely everything is assumed to support the original judgement. Frankly, I'd go to jail rather than disclose the invention and I'd give my money away and live on the street before paying my opponents legal fees.)


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