Number 5: Hey, laser lips, your mama was a location bot.
Location: California. I’m a mechanical engineer at a mid-sized robotics startup. About a year ago, I started building a small autonomous drone at home , totally separate from work, using my own tools, parts, and money. It was just a side hobby that turned into a functioning prototype. A few weeks ago, I casually mentioned it during lunch, and my manager got weirdly interested. Now HR emailed me asking for “documentation related to the independent project” because they want to “assess potential overlap with company IP.”The problem is, the company works on industrial robots, not drones. My design doesn’t share any code, hardware, or concept with company projects. But our employment contracts include a line about “inventions related to company interests,” which they can claim ownership of even if created off-hours. I never thought a flying drone could fall under that category. I haven’t shared the plans or shown them the actual prototype, but the fact that they’re asking for it makes me nervous. Could they actually take ownership of something I built completely on my own time, with no company resources? Should I lawyer up before I even reply to HR or just ignore it until they push harder?
I'm a California employment attorney and unfortunately the correct answer in the original thread was only like the sixth most upvoted. Cal. Labor Code section 2870 makes the relevant contract provision unenforceable. A lot of posters on that subreddit forget that California has laws for everything, and they just discuss general US legal principles.
No, the company is at least pushing if not overstepping the line here. "Relevant to company interests" is some bullshit - because read literally, it would include any business that the company claims it might theoretically have wanted to get involved in in the future, even if they aren't currently. This probably needs to go before a judge - and in California, OP might well win, because non-compete and similar clauses are read very narrowly and skeptically here. If the company isn't already in the drone business, I don't think they'll have a case.
The question here really isn't can the LAOP win this, because the answer could very well be "yes", but rather if they can be convinced to take the specific legal steps which will be the only possible way they can win this rather than assuming they can fight this battle themselves and not come out of it sans drone and employment.
Assuming he's right and doesn't jump straight to all-guns-blazing either way, coming out unemployed is somewhat unlikely, for a few reasons.
LAOP's skills are extremely in demand. Assuming he's otherwise competent, nobody wants to lose him.
The people who are going to litigate this are not his normal day to day co-workers or manager, so the amount of bad blood should be limited.
California also doesn't look favorably on companies retaliating against employees for asserting their rights. If he wins this case, or even just consults with a lawyer and gets it resolved with a "look, I'm fairly certain this is within my rights and isn't impacting my work, please don't make it a whole deal", and then his employer fires him, they'll end up out a lot more than the value of the drone.
The question here really isn't can the LAOP win this ... it's whether they can afford to take on their employer, and not come out of it sans drone and employment
I don't know enough of US contract law to say for sure, but to be honest I doubt that line means much if anything unless they also define what the company interests are somewhere in the contract. I suspect an attorney would not look forward to having to argue an IP claim under it.
"Related to company interests" is the sort of phrasing someone uses that thinks themselves to be rather more clever than they might end up being. It is woefully undefined and open-ended, because I can trivially argue it to mean *anything*. A for-profit company has a vested, legitimate interest in anything it can do that is legal and profiltable, hence anything they could theoretically monetize with some perspective of success would be related to company interests under that reading.
There's very little chance that such wide a reading would be considered to be proportional and appropriate, considering that at this point you might as well claim everything that an employee does outside of work to be company property. Of course the company wouldn't want to make that claim, because they know they'd lose; but it is a reasonable reading of that statement.
This is a problem for the company, because under the principle of contra proferentem ambiguities in contract are to interpreted against the party of the contract that supplied the wording. Since this almost certainly was the employer a court may well choose to interpret this in the way most disfavorable to the employer, which likely would be an extremely wide or an extremely narrow reading.
An extremely wide reading covering everything would mean the clause would be unlikely to survive due to the blatant unreasonableness of it; an extremely narrow reading would uphold the clause but would make it rather useless to the company by limiting it to improvements on existing products and *direct* adjacencies.
This sort of "company claims your hobby as its own IP" issue is fairly well-known among the software field, but I guess even in an adjacent field like robotics hardware it doesn't come up as often so folks don't have the general knowledge. OP is lucky they're in CA which somewhat curtails company's ability to claim employee side-projects but their contract sounds like the standard one written to go up to the bounds of what CA allows.
Standard operating procedure in software is to get your manager's approval in writing (email) if you want to contribute to open-source or have a hobbyist side-project. And always ask your boss, not legal, because your boss will just say "yeah whatever" but legal will actually try to assert ownership, and define their line of business in the most general and vaguest terms possible.
I was subject to a similar IP issue as a STEM PhD student, and the university's wording was pretty broad to cover all forms of IP across multiple fields.
Dude made a robot that flies, of course HR wants to see if he's stealing or infringing on their IP in his free time.
Also, he describes his employer as a "start-up." That's probably the worst kind of employer for this because (1) start-ups switch and expand scope at the drop of an angel investor's hat and (2) start-ups are notorious for shoddy HR & legal departments. If they think the company can monetize it, they'll at least try.
It can get astonishingly stupid very quickly indeed with open source. HR at my company wanted to approve every contribution before I sent it, and their process was "when we have time we will send it to the lawyers and if they ok it we will send it to your team lead for approval". Nine months later I hadn't signed the new contract and they were still refusing to budge, but the company owner got involved and gave us written approval to submit as we see fit, but leading or starting projects needs separate approval. So we signed the stupid contract.
FFS, I probably send a pull request every month and normally it's a few lines of "you need to cover this edge case" and half the time that's to fix a bug in something we use at work. It *helps* the company to have me do that, it means we don't have to patch libraries every time we update them. GRRRR!!
I wonder what happens if an employer wants to claim IP rights over software you wrote and have the rights for, but that you’ve applied an open source license to? I suppose they can technically get the rights to it but it would have to remain open source and you could keep working on it and distributing it in the same ways.
You can't grant rights to something you never had the rights to. If the employer genuinely had a claim to ownership of the software, the software would count as never having been open source in the first place.
When I talk about my hobbies at work I get called into HR and told to stop because apparently sitting at the park in a speedo covered in Vaseline and asking people to chase me is “inappropriate”
In the sense of product development, the two share a primary function (making marks with graphite pencil lead). They go about they in different ways.
A wooden pencil is like a disposable razor. You can use it a fairly limited number of times before the whole thing winds up in the trash.
A mechanical pencil on the other hand is more like a razor with disposable blades. If you keep replacing the consumable parts (lead and erasers) you can write with a mechanical pencil for decades.
If you’re interested in the evolution of the pencil, there’s a book on the subject written by an engineer (of course)
The same guy that wrote the pencil book also wrote a bunch of other books I really like and recommend to non-technical people because he’s really good at making the subject matter accessible to regular people.
In addition to The Pencil, my favorites are:
“To Engineer is Human “ which is about how failure drives design.
“The Evolution of Useful Things” which covers how mundane things like paperclips or forks have evolved into what we have today.
And for non-engineers who want to understand what it is that engineers do, I recommend “Invention by Design - How Engineers get from Thought to Thing”
It’s a startup so my money is on AI industrial robotics. OP thinks he’s got a next gen idea, so my money is on AI UAV. Pretty clear IP leakage potential in a situation like this.
It’s not unlikely that there could be some common code or software involved, though. Sensors, camera input, etc. I know OP says there isn’t but they are similar in concept — a drone is a robot if it’s controlled autonomously in any way.
And sometimes they know they are lost in the sauce and send HR/IP the plans for their new patio just in case because they don't want to get in trouble.
Robotics is all about mechanical proprioception, structural forces, and transforming desired beginning and end positions into precise, smooth movements, transformed into actuator control.
Quad copter drones are about radio control and aerodynamics. The actual control logic is a solved problem with dozens of open source solutions, and the components are off the shelf hobbyist parts. And even if the company could claim OPs IP, he doesn´t hold any IP rights over it anyway since those belong to the people making the parts/controll software.
It's like saying building a block tower at home means you IP rights in them are handed over since you are a carpenter.
This comment is kinda cracking me up. Midsize robotics companies usually target industrial manufacturing and factory shit. It's not gonna have much overlap with drones.
And like, the engineer making the things is usually a better judge of the overlap than HR.
Funny how the top comment says yes this is enforcable, while a couple comments down, citing the actual California Labor Code section 2870, says itś unenforcable.
It sounds like he's building a drone, not operating.
As to your question, you do need a part 107 for commercial drone us, which takes about an hour to study for and half hour to pass a written test before being allowed to fly.
I believe you can also substitute an actual pilots license, but in my limited experience operating drones, flying real planes seems like it would be harder.
Theoretically how would those clauses get enforced if they worked at 2 different companies. Like i work at robotics company A part time and part time at company B. Ignoring the logistics and probably of this situation. Who gets control of the IP?
Yup. That would fall under a standard non-compete. In my job/ industry, I'm not allowed to work for any direct competitor while with my current company.
It's not the same clause/law/case precedent, but California also protects moonlighting as long as it's not a direct conflict of interest. The case described above would probably be blockable by either company, though.
This is actually pretty straightforward in practice.
When doing work for your employer, the IP is actually owned by the employer by default. So it works out exactly as you'd expect - work done for Company A when on their time is owned by Company A, and work done for Company B on B's time is owned by Company B.
If you were to do side projects that potentially overlapped with one (or both!) A and B, you start to get into a very messy situation very quickly - which LAOP is discovering the hard way.
The general guideline in Software Engineering is that any hobbyist project must meet these criteria:
1) Not on company time (when you should be working)
2) Not using company property (laptop, hardware, etc)
3) Not using confidential information, or information derived strictly from your job.
It's usually option 3 that causes problems, because the actual scope of business for an employer can be unexpectedly wide. This is where LAOP got caught.
For example, I write lots of reports at work; they’ve provided me training relating to writing. If I wrote a fiction book unrelated to work, could they reasonably claim it derives from their information?
Though in practice it's usually for hobby projects specifically related to aspects of what you'd be doing at work, or using information you could only get by virtue of your position at work.
So writing a fiction novel should be fine - you could've learned to write anywhere, you had that skill before the job, and fiction is distinct from business writing. Though if you're writing a fiction novel that's narrating some of the reports you've made and presented at work... Maybe tread carefully.
What I find wild about this is that this seems to be a genuine hobby side project. It’s not unusual for employers to try to take ownership of stuff if you’re making money off it, or ask you to stop posting publicly about it if they’re worried about IP leakage, but a project for personal use you just casually mention is something else.
Like, theoretically, your employer probably owns every photo you take, but they mostly know better than to assert this and press the issue.
It’s the sort of stuff that leads to new legislation.
Or LAOP is leaving out the part where they’re trying to make money.
It's not legal advice because it's dishonest but if this was me I'd absolutely lean into the hobby project aspect and spend the weekend making something that looks like a drone from Lego technic and bring that in. Bonus points if it can carry my boss's mouse across the office and drop it in a bin.
Number 5: Hey, laser lips, your mama was a location bot.
Your title for this post is outstanding, btw.
Cat Fact: Cats believe “off-hours” and “your own time” belong to them regardless of what you’re working on.
This is such a hard truth, it's almost painful.
See this is the reason why we can’t ever have locationbot come back. No AI is ever gonna come up with cat facts as good as these.
No disassemble Number 5
No disassemble!
You know that contract I signed, did they, like, mean that
I mean, tbf, a lot of the time they don't. People stick loads of unenforceable stuff in contracts
OP is in the best possible state for this kind of thing.
I'm a California employment attorney and unfortunately the correct answer in the original thread was only like the sixth most upvoted. Cal. Labor Code section 2870 makes the relevant contract provision unenforceable. A lot of posters on that subreddit forget that California has laws for everything, and they just discuss general US legal principles.
No, the company is at least pushing if not overstepping the line here. "Relevant to company interests" is some bullshit - because read literally, it would include any business that the company claims it might theoretically have wanted to get involved in in the future, even if they aren't currently. This probably needs to go before a judge - and in California, OP might well win, because non-compete and similar clauses are read very narrowly and skeptically here. If the company isn't already in the drone business, I don't think they'll have a case.
The question here really isn't can the LAOP win this, because the answer could very well be "yes", but rather if they can be convinced to take the specific legal steps which will be the only possible way they can win this rather than assuming they can fight this battle themselves and not come out of it sans drone and employment.
Assuming he's right and doesn't jump straight to all-guns-blazing either way, coming out unemployed is somewhat unlikely, for a few reasons.
The company interests are to make money. If they think it will potentially make them money, it’s in their interests.
I don't know enough of US contract law to say for sure, but to be honest I doubt that line means much if anything unless they also define what the company interests are somewhere in the contract. I suspect an attorney would not look forward to having to argue an IP claim under it.
"Related to company interests" is the sort of phrasing someone uses that thinks themselves to be rather more clever than they might end up being. It is woefully undefined and open-ended, because I can trivially argue it to mean *anything*. A for-profit company has a vested, legitimate interest in anything it can do that is legal and profiltable, hence anything they could theoretically monetize with some perspective of success would be related to company interests under that reading.
There's very little chance that such wide a reading would be considered to be proportional and appropriate, considering that at this point you might as well claim everything that an employee does outside of work to be company property. Of course the company wouldn't want to make that claim, because they know they'd lose; but it is a reasonable reading of that statement.
This is a problem for the company, because under the principle of contra proferentem ambiguities in contract are to interpreted against the party of the contract that supplied the wording. Since this almost certainly was the employer a court may well choose to interpret this in the way most disfavorable to the employer, which likely would be an extremely wide or an extremely narrow reading.
An extremely wide reading covering everything would mean the clause would be unlikely to survive due to the blatant unreasonableness of it; an extremely narrow reading would uphold the clause but would make it rather useless to the company by limiting it to improvements on existing products and *direct* adjacencies.
Straight up fuck that weasel manager
This sort of "company claims your hobby as its own IP" issue is fairly well-known among the software field, but I guess even in an adjacent field like robotics hardware it doesn't come up as often so folks don't have the general knowledge. OP is lucky they're in CA which somewhat curtails company's ability to claim employee side-projects but their contract sounds like the standard one written to go up to the bounds of what CA allows.
Standard operating procedure in software is to get your manager's approval in writing (email) if you want to contribute to open-source or have a hobbyist side-project. And always ask your boss, not legal, because your boss will just say "yeah whatever" but legal will actually try to assert ownership, and define their line of business in the most general and vaguest terms possible.
I was subject to a similar IP issue as a STEM PhD student, and the university's wording was pretty broad to cover all forms of IP across multiple fields.
Dude made a robot that flies, of course HR wants to see if he's stealing or infringing on their IP in his free time.
Also, he describes his employer as a "start-up." That's probably the worst kind of employer for this because (1) start-ups switch and expand scope at the drop of an angel investor's hat and (2) start-ups are notorious for shoddy HR & legal departments. If they think the company can monetize it, they'll at least try.
It can get astonishingly stupid very quickly indeed with open source. HR at my company wanted to approve every contribution before I sent it, and their process was "when we have time we will send it to the lawyers and if they ok it we will send it to your team lead for approval". Nine months later I hadn't signed the new contract and they were still refusing to budge, but the company owner got involved and gave us written approval to submit as we see fit, but leading or starting projects needs separate approval. So we signed the stupid contract.
FFS, I probably send a pull request every month and normally it's a few lines of "you need to cover this edge case" and half the time that's to fix a bug in something we use at work. It *helps* the company to have me do that, it means we don't have to patch libraries every time we update them. GRRRR!!
I wonder what happens if an employer wants to claim IP rights over software you wrote and have the rights for, but that you’ve applied an open source license to? I suppose they can technically get the rights to it but it would have to remain open source and you could keep working on it and distributing it in the same ways.
You can't grant rights to something you never had the rights to. If the employer genuinely had a claim to ownership of the software, the software would count as never having been open source in the first place.
No it wouldn't. It's the same thing as if you downloaded the Windows source code leak, slapped a GPL license on it, and uploaded it to GitHub.
The open-source license is invalid because it was never yours to license.
When I talk about my hobbies at work I get called into HR and told to stop because apparently sitting at the park in a speedo covered in Vaseline and asking people to chase me is “inappropriate”
Exactly what I’d expect someone with your flair to say 🤣
Oh my god i didn't even notice their flair until I saw your comment
That made it so much better
Completely unrelated incidents I assure you.
Is it because your company makes very specific pornography and, like OP, they want to monitize it?
I mean obviously an 'autonomous drone' has no overlap with robotics, right? /s
Genuinely curious if the engineer brain is so lost in the sauce that he doesn't see it.
Engineers will argue that a mechanical pencil and a wooden pencil are fundamentally different objects that bear only the vaguest resemblance, so yes
Engineer here.
In the sense of product development, the two share a primary function (making marks with graphite pencil lead). They go about they in different ways.
A wooden pencil is like a disposable razor. You can use it a fairly limited number of times before the whole thing winds up in the trash.
A mechanical pencil on the other hand is more like a razor with disposable blades. If you keep replacing the consumable parts (lead and erasers) you can write with a mechanical pencil for decades.
If you’re interested in the evolution of the pencil, there’s a book on the subject written by an engineer (of course)
Awesome! I already have a book about the history of notebooks on my TNR list. I will obviously need to read these back to back.
Is this sarcasm? Because if it's not, I'd love the name of that book!
Nope, I'm serious! The book is called The Notebook: A History of Thinking on Paper by Roland Allen.
Just put it on my reading list.
Yay! Two new books to read!
Ooh thanks! Just ordered
The same guy that wrote the pencil book also wrote a bunch of other books I really like and recommend to non-technical people because he’s really good at making the subject matter accessible to regular people.
In addition to The Pencil, my favorites are:
“To Engineer is Human “ which is about how failure drives design.
“The Evolution of Useful Things” which covers how mundane things like paperclips or forks have evolved into what we have today.
And for non-engineers who want to understand what it is that engineers do, I recommend “Invention by Design - How Engineers get from Thought to Thing”
Add the shipping container book! I'm trying to get my library to buy it so I don't have to.
Engineer here furiously holding myself back from “well actually”-ing about how there are a lot of differences
By your logic rocket ships and bicycles are "the same thing" since they both move people, right?
Gentlemen: Res ipsa loquitor, in the flesh!
I kid, I kid :)
There's very little overlap between industrial robotics - those big mechanical arms you see in factories - and hobbyist drones.
Like, this feels like saying that you can't build a hang glider while you work for a car company, because they're both vehicles.
Actual mechanical engineers are not good at locating the line between "industrial" and "hobbyist", IME
It’s a startup so my money is on AI industrial robotics. OP thinks he’s got a next gen idea, so my money is on AI UAV. Pretty clear IP leakage potential in a situation like this.
It’s not unlikely that there could be some common code or software involved, though. Sensors, camera input, etc. I know OP says there isn’t but they are similar in concept — a drone is a robot if it’s controlled autonomously in any way.
And sometimes they know they are lost in the sauce and send HR/IP the plans for their new patio just in case because they don't want to get in trouble.
that's well and good until the CEO annex's your patio.
Your commute time to work may drop, but the dude is out there every Saturday doing naked yoga
It really, really does not.
Robotics is all about mechanical proprioception, structural forces, and transforming desired beginning and end positions into precise, smooth movements, transformed into actuator control.
Quad copter drones are about radio control and aerodynamics. The actual control logic is a solved problem with dozens of open source solutions, and the components are off the shelf hobbyist parts. And even if the company could claim OPs IP, he doesn´t hold any IP rights over it anyway since those belong to the people making the parts/controll software.
It's like saying building a block tower at home means you IP rights in them are handed over since you are a carpenter.
This comment is kinda cracking me up. Midsize robotics companies usually target industrial manufacturing and factory shit. It's not gonna have much overlap with drones.
And like, the engineer making the things is usually a better judge of the overlap than HR.
He cited "Trust Me Bro" so obviously I ended the investigation
- case note from your version of HR
Funny how the top comment says yes this is enforcable, while a couple comments down, citing the actual California Labor Code section 2870, says itś unenforcable.
Classic legaladvice.
Don’t you need a license to operate a drone and make money from it?
It sounds like he's building a drone, not operating.
As to your question, you do need a part 107 for commercial drone us, which takes about an hour to study for and half hour to pass a written test before being allowed to fly.
I believe you can also substitute an actual pilots license, but in my limited experience operating drones, flying real planes seems like it would be harder.
Theoretically how would those clauses get enforced if they worked at 2 different companies. Like i work at robotics company A part time and part time at company B. Ignoring the logistics and probably of this situation. Who gets control of the IP?
[deleted]
Yup. That would fall under a standard non-compete. In my job/ industry, I'm not allowed to work for any direct competitor while with my current company.
Does the California ban on non-competes have a carve out for this? I haven't a clue about the law here (Obviously)
It's not the same clause/law/case precedent, but California also protects moonlighting as long as it's not a direct conflict of interest. The case described above would probably be blockable by either company, though.
I have to clear any outside employment with my primary employer.
We can call these a "no moonlighting clause".
Or just period because they want to be controlling asses.
This is actually pretty straightforward in practice.
When doing work for your employer, the IP is actually owned by the employer by default. So it works out exactly as you'd expect - work done for Company A when on their time is owned by Company A, and work done for Company B on B's time is owned by Company B.
If you were to do side projects that potentially overlapped with one (or both!) A and B, you start to get into a very messy situation very quickly - which LAOP is discovering the hard way.
The general guideline in Software Engineering is that any hobbyist project must meet these criteria:
1) Not on company time (when you should be working) 2) Not using company property (laptop, hardware, etc) 3) Not using confidential information, or information derived strictly from your job.
It's usually option 3 that causes problems, because the actual scope of business for an employer can be unexpectedly wide. This is where LAOP got caught.
Surely there is reasonable limits to number 3.
For example, I write lots of reports at work; they’ve provided me training relating to writing. If I wrote a fiction book unrelated to work, could they reasonably claim it derives from their information?
Well, that's what lawyers are for.
Though in practice it's usually for hobby projects specifically related to aspects of what you'd be doing at work, or using information you could only get by virtue of your position at work.
So writing a fiction novel should be fine - you could've learned to write anywhere, you had that skill before the job, and fiction is distinct from business writing. Though if you're writing a fiction novel that's narrating some of the reports you've made and presented at work... Maybe tread carefully.
Or your employer just prohibits you from having another job in the industry at the same time.
What I find wild about this is that this seems to be a genuine hobby side project. It’s not unusual for employers to try to take ownership of stuff if you’re making money off it, or ask you to stop posting publicly about it if they’re worried about IP leakage, but a project for personal use you just casually mention is something else.
Like, theoretically, your employer probably owns every photo you take, but they mostly know better than to assert this and press the issue.
It’s the sort of stuff that leads to new legislation.
Or LAOP is leaving out the part where they’re trying to make money.
It's not legal advice because it's dishonest but if this was me I'd absolutely lean into the hobby project aspect and spend the weekend making something that looks like a drone from Lego technic and bring that in. Bonus points if it can carry my boss's mouse across the office and drop it in a bin.
[Explodes in boss's office, filled with glitter.]
"Yeah, sorry, still working out the kinks."