Can anyone offer legalese for retaining intellectual property as a programmer?

Question

I was recently talking to one of the guys in charge of the contracts for employees. I kind of lamented about the work-for-hire clause that says anything I create at work, even if completely unrelated to the business, belongs to the business. For instance, if I write a tool that helps me do my job, even if that tool is totally generic, they own it. If I write a bit of code that counts consonants in a string, they own it. Fair enough.

But my employer (not a software/IT company) is pretty open minded and asked me to investigate an alternative contract that actually separates business specific works-for-hire and other stuff, allowing the developer to keep the other stuff and use it on at-home side projects, etc. A similar situation has come up regarding a contract job in which we'd like to give the contractor similar rights to code/tools that are not specific to us. This would also apply to me contributing to open source projects at work (in order to do my job of course).

So the big question: how do I put this in legalese? Does anyone have anything like this in their employment or service contracts they could post here? Any experiences with this kind of thing?

Obviously I'm not a lawyer, neither will my employer be willing to hire a lawyer to draft this for us, but if I can put a reasonable clause together they will consider retrofitting it to our contracts. It's too good to pass up. :)

Answer 1

The law is different from country to country, state to state, county to county. Getting some bullet-proof boilerplate from Norway isn't going to play too well in Los Angeles.

Hire a lawyer who is licensed to practice in the county where you reside and who specializes in IPL.

Answer 2

If you are confident in your employer's good faith, then it may be possible to draft something without a lawyer. Obviously, you take a risk doing it without an intellectual property lawyer, so you'd have to weigh that against the cost of hiring one.

I would write up a very specific list of circumstances under which the code you write belongs to your employer, and another equally specific list of circumstances under which the code belongs to you. The more specific the better. The goal of the document is to make absolutely clear to both you and them what the rules are regarding ownership.

Answer 3

I've had this come up before too, though so far it's not been relevant.

One thing I'd definitely do - lawyer or no - is agree to a reasonable review period. That is, once every (say) 3 months, sit down and list the stuff you're working on outside of work and the stuff your working on at work. That way, if you get a disagreement, you can resolve it amicably right away (which will almost never be an issue) and you're unlikely to get into the situation that when you separate ways, you'll get a message saying - oh, but that bit of software is clearly work-related!

No matter how good your legalese, it's always easier to resolve this kind of stuff in a transparent environment.