In California I know that work you do does NOT get automatically assigned to your employer and, if your employer wants your independent work assigned over to them they must put that in the employment contract AND a copy of Section 2870(a) of the Calif. Labor Code. 2870 basically says your employer cannot force you to assign any of your rights to something you have created yourself on your own time with your own equipment unless what you have created relates at the time of conception or reduction to practice to work you are doing for that employer.
I don't know about other states...
However, if Andy was told by his employer not to work on JBoss because it competes in any way with the product his employer is making, taking CVS RW access away is the correct thing to do. At least until there is an agreement, in writing, giving blanket permission to contribute to the JBoss code base. The last thing you would want is for a company with their own EJB/Servlet/JSP/etc. implementation to slap an injunction against distributing JBoss right as they launch their product arguing that JBoss likely contains code that is their intellectual property. It could take months to clear the legal issues, all the while they are making money selling their product and JBoss developers find their consulting income wither to nothing.
At 02:31 PM 12/23/2002 -0500, you 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?
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