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github / balanced-employee-ip-agreement

GitHub's employee intellectual property agreement, open sourced and reusable
Creative Commons Zero v1.0 Universal
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Models for encouraging co-ownership #40

Closed yoshitamagoshi closed 7 years ago

yoshitamagoshi commented 7 years ago

This may not be the appropriate medium to discuss this but looking at this problem of 'my IP vs. the companies IP' from a different perspective, I'm curious what processes/practices GitHub or other organizations have implemented internally to encourage IP contributions from employees to the company domain. Are there public examples of incentive models, co-marketing programs, attribution guidelines, equity-split scenarios, etc. that could encourage employees to more readily co-invest in their IP with their companies?

Also curious if there are adaptations of BEIA that would work for service industries where the company may be building product on behalf of their clients and therefore may not have ownership of the IP their employees create directly.

mlinksva commented 7 years ago

@yrassoulli, on the 2nd part, I don't think there are any adaptations of BEIPA yet; it's only been published for two days. :smile: If anyone has pointers as to how it would be used or if it would need to be adapted for work product owned by clients, please share.

On the 1st part, the main practice implemented is to hire and pay employees to produce company owned IP. :smile: Thinking holistically, lots of different arrangements (both company and public policy) could be thought of as trying to increase or improve production or value from production by aligning incentives or shifting power. Two points in a large universe include company participation in open source (the output of which all have exploitation rights, even if there's only one owner) and laws putting limits or conditions on the assignment of various kinds of IP. A paper linked in the README encourages companies to consider arrangements that balance the need for companies to strictly control their IP with their interest in creating and leveraging employee tacit, relational, and "disruptive" knowledge; I encourage anyone with a broad interest in the topic to read it. I don't know that anyone has developed an ontology of all of the different public and private arrangements practiced, let alone possible, but I'd love a pointer if so.

I'm going to close this issue as I don't think there's anything directly actionable for this repo, but feel free to continue discussing -- and if there are any concepts or resources that come up that really ought be mentioned in the FAQ here, feel free to open a new issue or PR.