[ContractPatch] on Ethical Employment Contracts

[Karen M. Sandler]

On 2020-12-20 16:54, Tom Marble wrote:
> All:
> 
> Unsurprisingly I like Karen's ideas in
> https://sfconservancy.org/blog/2020/dec/17/ethical-contract-patch/
> 
> ... and I'm huge fan of Contract Patch in general.
> 
> I especially want to focus on this idea:
> 
>     Like most ContractPatch proposals, these approaches works best when 
> the
>     clause becomes standard. Companies are more likely to agree to 
> these
>     terms if many developers who interview ask for it.
> 
> Proposing marking up an employment agreement is a scary prospect when
> a new employee wants to make a good first impression. At the same time
> modern legal teams really (ought to) know about open source licenses:
> arriving at a shared community understanding of terms will make this
> less scary and more effective.

Yes, I agree. One of the most frequently asked questions is how to 
handle negotiations without alienating the new employer. I'm hoping to 
explore this topic in more detail in another blogpost, so if anyone has 
any thoughts or recommendations beyond the usual ones (don't try to 
negotiate your agreement until you have a firm offer, be nice but firm 
about asking, be sensitive to the pressures faced by the employer), 
please share them!

> Last year I took a full time job and did not attempt to keep copyright
> in my works. However I did have my lawyer review the agreement
> for any potential conflicts with my work on free software. And, for
> what it's worth, I had quite an extensive "Limited Exclusion
> Notification" section for pre-existing intellectual property.
> 
> Maybe we can steward this like a free software project? Folks that
> are passionate about a particular area can contribute? For example
> even a common set of definitions would be super useful. In the
> past couple of years (as an independent business owner) I worked with
> my lawyer on several agreements to define "Open Source Software".
> We should share these efforts!
> 
> Is a shared version control system a good next step?
> 
> Ideas please!
> 

Some folks have posted portions of the relevant provisions to this list. 
I worry that maintaining a public repo is an invitation to post 
agreements or information that are governed by confidentiality 
agreements. So maybe we should continue posting here instead? The goal 
was and still is to get some standard clauses up that have been vetted 
by counsel and that are generally applicable, which of course could then 
be discussed and improved on. We actually have a first draft of that 
already but it's slow going as our workload is so high at Conservancy.

k