GitHub lets staff own IP developed for personal projects using company resources
I work at a large law firm that represents a lot of software companies. Our standard employee agreement forms have the usual default (company owns everything you create with its resources or that relates to the scope of your employment).<p>This default has always amused me because <i>lawyers never sign these kinds of agreements with their own law firms</i>. We spend most of our time writing contracts, memos, and other bits of work product that, in theory[1], are protected by copyright. Ethics rules and professional norms also give the clients rights in the work product they pay us to produce. A firm&#x27;s partnership agreement <i>might</i> address this too. But most firms don&#x27;t even try to address who owns the underlying IP rights.<p>Moreover, it is extremely common for partners moving between firms to take all of their forms with them. The result is that people treat contract forms as-a sort of IP-free zone. It would not even be possible to ascertain the original authorship of most form contracts that cross my desk.<p>Historically, this hasn&#x27;t mattered because law firms charged for hours worked. It will matter a great deal if firms shift toward offering more automated products that can be sold outside the billable hour.<p>[1] As with source code, there&#x27;s also uncertainty about which aspects of a contract are expressive and which are purely functional. Only the expressive parts are protected by copyright.<p>Update: one project I&#x27;ve had in the back of my mind is to illustrate this point by crawling the SEC&#x27;s EDGAR website and tracing the &quot;genealogy&quot; of bits of contract language in public companies&#x27; filings. (Companies need to file certain &quot;material agreements&quot;). If anyone has some suggestions for good text processing libraries that can help with this tracing, I would love to hear about them.