Company policy on side-projects
polycounter lvl 18
I'm pretty sure most of us here are doing side/personal projects while they work full time at a certain studio.
I was wondering if some people could share what the policy of their current job is on commercial side-projects, like iPhone games. Do most companies prohibit projects that you want to publish on the App Store etc?
Also, for the non-commercial side-projects, does the company you work for, own the rights to the stuff you do AFTER you're daily job? Or is whatever you do at home, yours.
Also I'm not sure if people are comfortable with sharing this kind of information, if they are not, sorry for asking.
Thanks.
I was wondering if some people could share what the policy of their current job is on commercial side-projects, like iPhone games. Do most companies prohibit projects that you want to publish on the App Store etc?
Also, for the non-commercial side-projects, does the company you work for, own the rights to the stuff you do AFTER you're daily job? Or is whatever you do at home, yours.
Also I'm not sure if people are comfortable with sharing this kind of information, if they are not, sorry for asking.
Thanks.
Replies
It becomes slightly more difficult if you do some of you project's work on the workplace. Like during lunchtime... The company can then argue that the project is theirs because you made it on their time.
Some work agreements can carry a non compete clause, so direct competition with the companies main commercial interest is not allowed then. But if you're working for a AAA company that has no plans to make mobile games, I fail to see the problem if you want to make an iPhone game for instancen. But be sure to check with your employer and re-read your work agreement to be sure!
If your contract does not have a non compete clause, you're basically free to do whatever you want.
The property/IP thing generally won't get brought into effect - it's just to cover bases and arses.
The making money thing - especially if it's a direct competitor or related to what you do at work (i.e. selling a game you made yourself) - will more than likely be frowned upon unless you get it cleared, though.
Mods and non-commercial stuff - so long as it's not a direct competitor - eh, probably not going to get you in trouble but it's still worth getting it cleared.
The scope and severity of this will vary from contract to contract and country to country.
what you do on your own time should be none of their business. they dont own your personal time. just make sure you dont do anything personal/side project on your wrok place. if you have side projects, then just keep it secret.
in some cases the company sponsors your work visa and in the contract specifies you work for them exclusively and for no one else. this is the only exception though.
other than that, you should be able to do what ever you want with when you are not in the office.
That said, it's reasonable for studios not to want you to make products that compete with their business. Some are strict (no personal games whatsoever) while others make allowances for mobile games if they have no history or intention of entering the market. I know of one feature animation studio that makes you pitch your short ideas internally before you can produce it on your own. Some have you write all your ideas down on a giant list before you start working -- I suppose as legal proof of your personal ideas before you were influenced by your job at that company.
The easiest way to get around such stipulations is to create your own company. This is actually fairly common when working on iPhone games. Just file the proper paperwork with your state government to form your own little S-Corp. Once you have your own company, you can simply publish your games under that company. If the rights to the games are owned by your company (and not by you personally), then the company that you work at during the day can't lay any claim to them.
Of course, the BEST course of action is to check with your employer first, and ideally insist that your employee contract allow for a little more freedom in this matter. I actually don't work for a game company, so this issue never comes up for me. My hobby is wholly unrelated to my day job, and I checked my employee contract for such particulars before signing on board.
I've requested aproval for mine, will hear back soon I hope.
e.g any clauses in your contract that go against national law are void and it doesn't matter that you agreed to them. e.g in some EU countries anti compete clauses are just pretty much meaningless. same goes for claiming ownership clauses. so check with a lawyer for a definite answer to this question. It all depends where you are and on the local labor laws which govern work contracts.
Generally, salaried employees fall under the "work made for hire" doctrine. Legally speaking anything you do while employeed, whether at home on your free time or not, belongs to the company. I'm not a lawyer, so I don't know what the legal boundaries of this are. Nearly every job I've had has pretty clearly spelled this out in the initial paperwork and employee contract, even going so far as to declare personal projects you were working on prior to being hired so they could be properly exempted.
Now, I'd personally like to believe that most companies are not asshats about this. Very unlikely that they'll try to claim ownership of something you've done on your personal time. I have no idea how they'd go about proving something you worked on was done while working for them in a court of law. I believe these work-for-hire claims are mainly there to protect their own intellectual property while you're employed with them.
But, you'll be far better off if you talk to someone at work, explain exactly what you're doing (in as much detail as your comfortable with sharing), and get them to sign some sort of document saying that your personal project is exempt. You can't go wrong with signed documents.
I have decided to not extend my contract with the company because we could not find a good solution to this. They simply don't like it when one of their employees is working on his own game in his free time.
We did try to work something out, but it was messy in all cases so I decided to just end it there, and take a year off and try doing my own games.
As for the legality of things, here is a bit more info that I found out( I live in Holland, so not sure how accurate this if for the rest)
I was lucky that the company was pretty easy to talk to, so I will actualy be doing some freelance stuff for them, and keep in touch.
So 2012 is going to be an experemental year for me, it's scary but also exciting.
best of luck
Its a shame your company can't let you do something on the side osman. Just seems wrong that any company can claim that anything done outside of work belongs to them. I'd also be walking away from any company that enforces this policy.
My coding partner is thinking about asking permission to do our game. I will tell her to review her contract first to see if there are any "outside" work policies. But its comforting to read that:
"If you are working on a game together with someone, that removes ALL the rights from your current employee, since they can't claim your partners part of the work."
As the game is my concept and i'm doing all the art. They wont be able to claim on it.
Will procede with caution though. Thanks for posting this.
Yeah it's good that you guys are being cautious with this.
And I personaly think that one of the problems we have in our industry is the thought'go ahead and leave, there is 20 other candidates waiting to fill in your job for almost no pay'. And we really have to fix that, don't just accept anything they offer you, don't accept insultingly low pay. This is the reason I decided to just leave.
I know that not everyone has the luxery to do this, some poeple just need a job desperately. But I really hope to see some improvement in our industry. I'm lucky that in my case my company actually TRIED to find a solution to this, but it was not quite what I personally wanted. But credit where it's due, they did try instead of just saying NO.
a "limited liability" company: will do just that. ( unless yes perpetuating outright criminal fraud )
Depending on what state all you need is a friend savvy enough to file a "Articles of Organization."
It's like if I worked on a fishing boat, but still fished as a hobby when I got home. Then they come and take the fish I caught on the weekend.
most big companies do have a part of the contract that says your intellectual property is theres. the last big company I worked for said that if I made anything that they could use in business (i.e stuff that theyre in the business of making, like software) then it was theirs for the taking.
There is such a thing as Piercing the corporate veil, where an individual is still vulnerable to lawsuits because the court will look beyond the legal status of a LLC or SCorp to the actual situation of an individual actually being the entirety of the company that they have set up.
@osman:
Best of luck with your game(s)!
It sucks that you had to quit your job to be able to work on your own commercial projects.
Companies should really be encouraging that sort of thing, because honestly it'll likely be the top tier employees doing these kinds of things rather than the bottom of the barrel people just trying to pull in the next paycheck. Losing such employees from a company is a huge mistake in the long run IMHO.
Correct... Don't do that.
If the veil is ever lifted there should be a lot of angry developers ( your like minded associates ) under there. Having a legal mind on that team is a plus.