Spent lunch time reviewing and heavily scrutinizing a contract and I am concerned about the inventions clause part where anything that I invented during the course of working for some company, the invention becomes theirs. Looking back at my previous company, the same clause was also in the contract but I didn’t gave it much thought because I was not inventing anything back then and when I realized about an idea while I was at my previous employer, I didn’t evolved it even right after I left the company. I only started working on that idea early this year.
Now a different contract has the same clause. It’s going to be risky then to continue on that path while I am working for a new company. If I delay it to be out of the scope of their invention’s claim clause, the industry might have moved further and the competitors might be on the same playing field with me already. Actually there are some companies that has the same solution as what I have in mind but already marketing it ahead of me.
The best course of action that gives me more protective leverage is to implement the system architecture soon before my start of date on working with this new company. In that way, they can not claim my creation to be theirs because I already finished creating it before I even start working for them. Looks like busy weeks ahead!
On the other hand, I can offer my creation to the new company and negotiate on benefits such as royalties, revenue share, compensation, etc., without them claiming my intellectual property as theirs simply because I finished it before my employment starts.
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