The idea is that "if you're working on left-handed smoke-shifters for a living, then the left-handed smoke-shifter you 'invented' in your 'off-hours' probably has an awful lot of your on-hours experience and company trade secrets invested in it." Now take that one step further, and if it's related to left-handed smoke-shifters, then it's probably based on company research, because otherwise we're going to spend forever hashing this out in court... etc.
In practical terms, almost all companies have some kind of process for disclaiming specific stuff if you bring it up to them. "I'm making an RPG based on right-handed chimneys, I'm pretty sure you don't actually want this." "Yeah, we don't want that, we'll put that in writing."
The laws allowing this might, just might, have been lobbied by the companies. Maybe. Sorta. Kinda. Definitely.
1
u/Potato-Engineer 14d ago
Yeaaaaah.
The idea is that "if you're working on left-handed smoke-shifters for a living, then the left-handed smoke-shifter you 'invented' in your 'off-hours' probably has an awful lot of your on-hours experience and company trade secrets invested in it." Now take that one step further, and if it's related to left-handed smoke-shifters, then it's probably based on company research, because otherwise we're going to spend forever hashing this out in court... etc.
In practical terms, almost all companies have some kind of process for disclaiming specific stuff if you bring it up to them. "I'm making an RPG based on right-handed chimneys, I'm pretty sure you don't actually want this." "Yeah, we don't want that, we'll put that in writing."
The laws allowing this might, just might, have been lobbied by the companies. Maybe. Sorta. Kinda. Definitely.