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
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.
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.
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