I wasn’t allowed to tell anyone that my flatmate isn’t allowed to work for another company in their industry for twelve months after they leave their current job.
The company is owned by a foreign national and their hiring documents were full of weird, improper regulations, including any residents of the house not revealing any of the NDA that my flatmate signed, so while I didn’t sign anything, I was technically(impractically and I can’t imagine legally) forbidden, according to a clownish NDA, from discussing all sorts of things.
Yes, I read the whole thing just to see what else it said.
The company technically owes the signing employee at least 6 months of any revenue connected to any project connected to that employee’s position at the time of signing.
It’s supposed to be a salaried compensation point, but is vaguely worded incorrectly enough that it logically says any project connected to that position at all must direct a portion of its revenue to that employee, regardless of any circumstance.
Without any qualifications such as length of hire, time spent on the project, nominal involvement, a minimum of 6 revenue months of projects connected to that position must be directed toward the employee.
Place I used to work had a “we own all the IP you generate” clause, except it wasn’t very clearly written so could easily be read to mean literally all IP - write a song on the weekend, they own that. Got the wording tweaked in my contract to make it explicitly only cover things done in connection to my role, on company time, but I do wonder about my former colleagues. At least one of them has a mildly successful YouTube channel that I guess the company technically owns?
Won’t stand up in court. You can’t just put anything into a contract and expect it to stand up. You can’t bind yourself into slavery (which that is kind of close to) or break the law, or force all sorts of conditions on the other party.
I don’t know that it’s that clear cut - trying to enforce a provision like that would almost certainly be seen as unreasonable, but unless there is some specific law forbidding it in your jurisdiction you’d probably need to ask a court if it conflicts with broader employment law rules to the level that a court would nullify it. Getting an answer to that question is likely to be very expensive, even if you are right.
It’s definitely a risky strategy to just say “try me”, I guess it depends what it’s all over. I doubt that lawyers would even want to pursue it, after maybe a few letters.
I don’t have anything very interesting. I’ve been under NDA for various game betas at various times. One of them I’m still technically not allowed to even say there was a beta for me to have been a part of. Namely, the Age of Empires 2 expansion “Return to Rome” which brought Age of Empires 1 gameplay and civs into a separate game mode of AoE2, which had a secret closed beta around January this year.
It’s not quite an NDA, but as a temporary worker for the AEC and ECQ (my state and federal electoral commissions), I’ve been prohibited from expressing a political opinion in public. Exactly how that’s supposed to work I’m not sure. I’ve usually just taken it to mean I can’t comment political stuff on Facebook between the date I accept the role and the date after the election (Lemmy and previously Reddit being pseudonymous, I’ve never cared much about following the political neutrality requirements here). People who know my IRL know my politics, so if it comes up during that time I usually just say “I’m not actually allowed to talk about that” with a wink.
The AEC and ECQ are government bodies here in Australia, that regulate elections (AEC is the Australia Electoral Commission - the federal body - and the ECQ is the Electoral Commission of Queensland - the state body for Queensland’s elections).
When you sign up to assist as a temporary worker (eg. election scrutineer, etc), you’re bound by very specific terms as an employee of the government.
I once signed up to help out with our national census, which made me a temporary employee of the Australian Bureau of Statistics - the ABS. The terms in that agreement were similar to the above commenter’s experience, I reckon, as we were also required to be politically impartial in public (among other things).
Eh, when you’re literally performing the job of runnkng the election—giving people ballots and counting the results after—I think it’s pretty reasonable to have a requirement of maintaining an appearance of political neutrality.
It depends on how you read it. It’s probably a Hatch act mirror or the Hatch Act itself. If so, it only applies when he is representing his employer or giving the appearance of using his position to influence. It all gets Grey and muddy real quick, especially in a position like that.
I had to Google it, but it looks like the Hatch Act is American law? So unless there’s a similarly-named law here that does the same thing, I don’t think it’s relevant.
Not that strange, but certainly fucking annoying: at universities it’s becoming more common to have “closed searches” for upper administrators like presidents, provosts, deans, etc. This is very much a labor/management thing, and historically (in the US) public universities have had open searches, where faculty and staff get to meet candidates, ask them questions, etc. Upper admins have taken over all decision making power in recent decades, but in the past few years they’ve even started preventing faculty/staff from even knowing who is applying to be their new uni president. Under pressure to do something about “the consent of the governed,” admins have “allowed” some faculty and staff to view interviews and things, but are forced to sign NDAs to do so.
At public universities, using taxpayer money, promising large amounts of taxpayer money to some person. It’s stupid and annoying.
I was going to go on a first date when the guy asked me to sign an NDA. He was attempting to be a content creator on YouTube, tiktok, etc., and thought he needed to start “protecting his reputation”. I declined the date.
If it was around the time I suspect, he might’ve been worried about the me too stories that were breaking. Which means he thought his own conduct could’ve been seen as questionable. Which means it was very questionable. So bullet dodged. Hooray for not being one of his sexual assault victims.
Aren’t NDAs unenforceable against illegal conduct anyway? I suppose he could have been covering for gross behavior that wasn’t across the line into full criminality. Either way, what a fuckin dork, I hope his channel sucks.
Such clauses/contracts often are just an empty threat. If enough people believe in its legality, they will act accordingly, so it accomplished its goal.
I am impressed by your resilience that you didn’t immediately swoon over his intelligence, diligence, and confidence, which is what I would strongly presume was his actual expectation.
Yeah, not a unique thing, unfortunately. I worked for a legal resources mill (I’m not a lawyer) that pumped out stuff like basic NDA templates and wills.
I saw a distressing number of men trying to customize templates with statements about allegations of sexual assault will be settled privately, any public accusation of sexual impropriety will result in the woman owing $_ to the guy, etc. Horrible stuff, flashing neon red flag with red fireworks exploding overhead. And not how NDAs work.
I didn’t even read the whole thing, TBH. It’s been a while, I’ll have to see if I still have access via the link he sent me. That’s even more blatantly sleezy than I was thinking. If he actually managed to build any sort of following, they might be interested to see what he attempts to put in his NDAs.
Gross. Well today is a “losing hope in humanity” kind of day.
Not really my own NDA, but kind of remarkable on its own. I discovered a number of people I know have been living according to witness protection. Apparently witness protection has recurring favored locations and the area is like Bellwood for Witsec. Funniest part is they all know each other and themselves have no idea half the time. It feels like that one joke with that one zoo that gets people in animal costumes to live as animals only to find out the whole zoo are animals.
I found my completed but unsubmitted NDA form from my last job under a stack of papers after I left. HR just forgot to ask me for it and I forgot it existed
That’s relatively common… if the company isn’t full of dick bags you can usually get specific carve-outs. Nobody gives a shit about the game you’re programming on the side - they’re just unfamiliar with corporate espionage laws and being overly defensive.
At EOD any real lawsuit is going to pretty much ignore any NDA that isn’t hyperspecific. I mentioned in another comment that I signed an NDA preventing me from disclosing the contents and parties in another NDA… that’s highly fucking enforceable, and it’s necessary because normally surface level information about contracts aren’t considered secret knowledge. But all the ones we programmers sign are nearly completely horseshit - not because you can freely violate it, but because disclosing proprietary business practices is already illegal unless explicitly allowed.
I had the same thing. It was an otherwise very interesting short term contract that I really wanted to do. I had a spare time project that I was already working on though. I ended up taking it and pausing my side project until the contract finished. One of the more ridiculous things it said was something like ‘no inspiration you have during the contract validity may be monetized’.
That’s what finally convinced me to release it later as Copyleft, not because I thought they would come after me but because patent law can get fecked.
I also met my wife on a gig where we both signed NDAs with non-fraternization clauses.
Funny story but that’s how the patent law works in Germany and I believe at least Japan aswell. I don’t know about other places but I wouldn’t be surprised if this applied to the majority of the industrialised world.
If you come up with an idea that could be patented while employed, you must to tell your employer about it and offer it to them. In return, they must either register it themselves and give you an appropriate compensation or decline ownership of it; allowing you to register it yourself.
Rationale behind that, if you work in i.e. IT and invent an IT-related thing after you’ve clocked out for the day, you probably wouldn’t have had the idea if you hadn’t spent the majority of your day working on the topic for a couple years.
I think this is actually quite fair as, even if the company decides to keep it for themselves, it’d register, use, license and defend the patent for you (for a great cut of course).
I might have forgot it coming through the doors at work.
Fuck that logic <3
Edit: I’d guess the law was made by employers so the loopholes must be plenty to spin the compensation for low level staff enough to justify giving 1% or something from the patent revenue.
I worked on a website for some folks that make juice. They… I guess they think they have something special? They don’t… I’ve looked through it all. Nothing you can’t find online. Same shit every college town juicer selling celery this and tumeric that and activated charcoal whatever.
But, I suppose I could use this info to start an analog of their business. I mean, I don’t want to, at all. But I could. 🤷♂️
My current job tried to get me to sign one that would prohibit me both from discussing the content of the NDA, and had a noncompete rider that was extremely aggressive.
I told them I wouldn’t sign it, and it was unenforceable in this state anyway, so they might as well drop it. They did, but the whole thing made me super leery of working here. Corporate bullshit all the way down.
An NDA can’t ever block discussing itself - I know because I had to sign an NDA in perpetuity covering who the other signatory was on a different NDA also in perpetuity. Everything subject to that inner NDA is now completely irrelevant, but the companies involved still definitely exist and are just as litigious as ever.
I later went on to design some computer processing systems and storage systems related to US Healthcare tracking which is mostly not covered by an NDA, though the work is proprietary and not shareable, and it’s much more worthy of the crazy NDA I signed in my twenties. NDAs are much more about who and less about what - if you’re working restocking vending machines with Suisse Credit, you’ll probably need to sign an NDA… but a more modest company doing legitimately secret stuff usually doesn’t care.
You can always always discuss any contract with a lawyer. It is incredibly illegal to try and bar someone from seeking a professional opinion on a contract. If any company tries this then immediately reach out to a labor attorney.
In Illinois, where I am, NDAs aren’t enforceable unless they’re provided at least two weeks before the start of employment, so they can be reviewed by legal counsel. They have this one a week after I started, one of many ways it was unenforceable.
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