Oh, absolutely they should be firewalled by device if you are a salaried employee, especially since most employees work on computers that are the property of their company. But can't my employer assert that they bought all my time when I signed up to be an exempt employee? The moonlighting laws in CA seem to give them leway to so if they are in a related area to my project, which for AmaGoopleSoft is potentially everything that can be done with software these days.
But can't my employer assert that they bought all my time when I signed up to be an exempt employee?
No, that would be illegal in pretty much every state, except possibly the worker-hostile US Deep South.
The moonlighting laws in CA seem to give them leway to so if they are in a related area to my project, which for AmaGoopleSoft is potentially everything that can be done with software these days.
This is backwards. CA's laws are one of the few in the country that actually let you do this type of thing. Most states let companies have extremely permissive claims to products/IP created by their workers, even off the clock. CA is one of the few states that strongly protects workers' individual creations produced off the clock. In a nutshell, unless you're an executive, material employee, or significant owner of the company, the stuff you make in your free time is yours unless it's directly within the scope of the Company's business activities. And generally, even in those situations CA law provides procedures to protect the workers' independently created IP.
Note: off the clock for these purposes roughly means that you're (a) not in the office/facility and (b) not working on a specific task or project for the company. I'm not going into all of the nuances in this comment.
>> But can't my employer assert that they bought all my time when I signed up to be an exempt employee?
> No, that would be illegal in pretty much every state, except possibly the worker-hostile US Deep South.
A friend of mine had to put his PhD on-hold when the company he worked for was acquired by Oracle, while his lawyer and their lawyers argued over whether the "standard employment contract" he was being asked to sign prevented him from publishing his thesis as required by the university to complete his PhD... A face value reading pretty much claimed "everything you think while employed by Oracle becomes IP exclusively owned by Oracle", and his new manager, their manager, and several levels up the corporate hierarchy all stuck to that interpretation for months before granting what was desc ribed to them as an "extremely unusual one-time-only expemtion which you musty not disclose to any colleagues".
Companies do plenty of things that are illegal, especially when it comes to labor law.
That being said, this story doesn't make sense unless it takes place outside of CA. Work for a PhD thesis is generally done on university grounds, giving the university the putative right to the underlying IP. A third-party employer like Oracle would have to duke it out with the university to claim ownership, no matter what their employment contracts said.
OTOH, if work for the PhD was done using Oracle facilities and equipment, then it makes perfect sense for Oracle to investigate IP ownership since many PhD thesis projects go on to become valuable commercial products.
This was complex. The acquired company was in the US, but not in CA. The university was in Australia, and yes they also claimed ownership (which had already been agreed as part of starting the PhD). It's quite likely the work on the PhD prior to the Oracle acquisition was done on the original acquired companies equipment (and probably time as well).
It was without doubt a time wasting and frustrating shitfight ensuring he was "allowed" to think about his PhD topic after being acquired by Oracle (although he had enough equity to have done quite nicely out of the deal anyway, I suspect...)
Yes, but that’s not the primary issue in this case. Even then you can firewall based on device... which is a good idea considering large employers don’t even have to go through courts to get access to the device they issued you.
