Resources for assigning employee intellectual property back? As an employee of a software company they own my personal time projects, this is not in question. That said, my employer is quite reasonable about said things and at least verbally quite willing to review something and say "this isn't related to our work, you can have it." It being a small shop, verbal acknowledgement has been all they used before; they have no form for assigning a particular projects IP back to an employee. For a project I want to make and open source I would like something in writing. My employer is receptive to that but they want me to provide the form. I have been looking for either a template or some resource to help me write a little thing that they can sign that says something like: "The company transfers back all rights related to this project to employee, and we cannot take this back later." I suspect I don't know the correct terms to search because all I find are templates for employers to have new hires sign that assign their IP to the employer or articles talking about how really the employer owns all IP anyways. Is there a particular term I can search for this? Do such templates exist?
The Free Software Foundation faced the same issue, as many contributors needed disclaimers from their employers. Luckily, it's not difficult. Their template: Yoyodyne, Inc., hereby disclaims all copyright interest in the program “Woodpecker” (which deconstructs trees) written by James Hacker. signature of Moe Ghoul 1 April 1989 Moe Ghoul, President of Vice As the year 1989 indicates, this template has been accepted for decades.
The employee must, during and after employment, without limitation in time, observe a duty of confidentiality regarding [...] the Company's internal affairs such as business plans, profitability, pricing, employees, methods, processes, routines, code and the like as well as other information that the Company typically wants to keep secret The pure information that the company had at some time a security problem with their product is internal knowledge you only gained through working there. By what is written here, you are indeed prohibited from speaking about it. If it were public knowledge, you could point to a press release and say &quot;I did that, that was me fixing the problem&quot;. That would work. Because it doesn't share anything that isn't public anyway. But you cannot share things the company wants to keep secret. Finding out whether that contract is legally enforcable in your country and juristiction is the job of a real lawyer, but just as written, they are right. You signed a contract to not do that, not talk about it an certainly not publish it on the internet. So you should not do that, unless a good lawyer you trust tells you otherwise. That said, &quot;I found a security flaw&quot; is about as impressive as &quot;I found a dollar on the floor&quot;. Maybe you can talk about your knowledge to prevent something like it happening. That says nothing about whether or not it happened in your old company, and for me as an employer it is much more valuable to have you on board with structured knowledge you can apply, than with your memories of being lucky once.
I would recommend talking to an adult person in HR. I'm quite sure they will notice that what your manager wants to do is more than dodgy, and doing something dodgy may be in the interest of your manager, but not in the interest of the company. The best thing is to go to HR, acting as if a mistake has been made, and point out to them what your start date was, and that the new contract has the incorrect starting date, and they need to fix this mistake or you can't sign the contract. If they insist you sign it, then you DON'T sign it. If they say you will be fired if you don't sign it, then you tell them that in that case you would get legal advice. BTW. You definitely don't sign this as it is. PS. This answer was posted on workplace.stackexchange, not law.stackexchange, so please don't complain if there is no legal content.
Attribution is not a legal requirement If company A owns IP (copyright and trademarks in this case), they can licence it to company N on whatever terms are mutually acceptable. They may require company N to attribute their IP or they may not.
Am I contractually obligated to follow that old handbook? Yes. Consider this: your employer gave you a copy of the handbook saying, "here is a copy of the staff handbook." Because of this, you know that the document in question is the staff handbook of your company, regardless of the fact that it bears an old name, and that the policies it expresses are part of the terms of your employment contract. If you were truly concerned that the document in question had no validity as the staff handbook, you perhaps should have expressed that concern by telling the person giving you the document that they appear to have given you the wrong document, because it bears a different name. By not doing this, you accept the terms in the document. On the other hand, if you do do that, you'll just irritate the people who have to produce a rebranded staff handbook so they can give you a copy.
There is no IP in ideas Any code would by subject to copyright (who owns that copyright is itself a convoluted and separate question), however, if the 4 of you abandoned any existing code, notes and images and start over you would have no legal impediment.
I'm assuming that you are not seeking to change the license, and so it will remain GPLv3. As long as you've built on the original software, that license still applies. You also need to keep the previous copyright notices, including the names of the original people. Assuming that, everything you're doing is legal, which is what's on topic here. There is some etiquette around forks (which is what you're doing), which would be on topic at the Open Source Stack Exchange. I'm puzzled by your desire to have a different license text. You can't change the license from GPLv3, so that has to stay the same. (If the original has GPLv3 "or, at your option, any later version", you can drop the any other version text if you like.)
The notice has a lot to do with legacy requirements in the United States to claim the copyright to a work. Up until 1989, the copyright notice was required. Today, the statements are mainly maintained to protect against "innocent infringement" which might reduce what a content owner can get in court. What exactly do those terms entail? That the owner stated owns all rights and you may do nothing with the content. My biggest concern is this: by writing that, is the company claiming to own everything on the website, even potentially copyrighted user-submitted material? That's exactly what they are doing. Depending on the terms of the specific site, content contributors generally either assign copyright to the site owner or license the content in a way that allows the site owner to do exactly what they want with it. Site creators with the smarts or money to do it right/get someone to do it right usually state something like: Copyright [Site Owner] and contributors. Other sites (like this one) state specifically what they hold the copyright to: site design / logo © 2015 Stack Exchange Inc THIS IS NOT LEGAL ADVICE. CONSULT AN ATTORNEY REGARDING YOUR SPECIFIC SITUATION.