D&D 5E Why I Think D&DN is In Trouble

[Halivar]

Attempts to claim ownership of what you do in your off-work hours, on the other hand, is a an order of magnitude more onerous than telling employees not to engage in conflict of interest material, or risk losing their employment.

I'd be interested in knowing if there's any legal precedent that such a clause could stand up to a challenge in court or not.

They are standard in my industry, and yes, they hold up in court. By signing the employment contract, all work that is copyrightable, trademarkable, or patentable is considered "work for hire", and thus owned by the company hiring you.

EDIT: I lucked out in that my current employer narrowed it down to specifically work that is in the same type of product that I produce for my job.

 

[GMforPowergamers]

Yes, conflict of interest clauses are common in employment contracts. I know all about that.

Attempts to claim ownership of what you do in your off-work hours, on the other hand, is a an order of magnitude more onerous than telling employees not to engage in conflict of interest material, or risk losing their employment.

I'd be interested in knowing if there's any legal precedent that such a clause could stand up to a challenge in court or not.

Regardless, talk about tone-deaf management. It shouldn't be surprising that folks showed themselves to the door in that environment. Especially since in the early days of d20 it seems like most of the successful d20 start-ups were side projects of WotC employees.

I've never worked for WotC or any rpg or computer firm, but I have twice in my life signed such an agreement, once was for just call center work... I had heard of it many years earlier when Blockbuster had such a thing for there store managers...

Not saying it's right or wrong, but not unheard of...

I will say though, if you are being paid good money to dream up idea's for X and you take your 'free time' to make your own X then sell it to compete with your company you work for's X... that seems pretty bad too... so I agree with atleast the basic theory of "If you work for WotC designing RPGs you can't sell other RPGs made during the same time" and replace Wotc with any company and RPG with any product that is mostly thought and intelectial property....

 

[Desdichado]

They are standard in my industry, and yes, they hold up in court. By signing the employment contract, all work that is copyrightable, trademarkable, or patentable is considered "work for hire", and thus owned by the company hiring you.

If you don't mind my asking, what industry do you work in? And are there specific court cases that you're aware of where this was challenged?

In my industry, we have conflict of interest clauses as part of our employment contract. We also sign away any work done with company resources, or on company time. And if I leave to work elsewhere in the industry, I can expect to sign some non-compete stipulations. This is all pretty standard.

But if I'm understanding this correctly, this is more like, if I go home in the evening and write a novel on my own computer on my own time in my own house, that my company would attempt to claim ownership of the novel simply because I work for them as my day job. Either I'm understanding this incorrectly, or that's way out of whack with my own experience in the corporate world. I'd be very surprised that such a novel author wouldn't try to sue the employer if they honestly tried to appropriate ownership of my novel, and I'd be very surprised if such a suit weren't successful.

Now, that's not exactly an apples to apples comparison, because I don't work for a novel publishing company, but still... the notion that your day job tries to claim ownership of what their employees do while moonlighting is an order of magnitude different than putting non-compete clauses in their employment contracts. It's this really rather radical difference that I'm remarking on, not the notion that non-compete clauses exist in the first place. I'm quite familiar with those.

 

[NewJeffCT]

well, there is a big difference between working (for example) as an insurance salesperson by day, and then writing your own novel at night, and working in the RPG industry during the day and then working on your own RPG at night.

Working on what could be almost the exact same thing and a potential direct competitor is an inherent conflict of interest.

 

[Morrus]

I think there's an element of "OK, here's the deal. We'll pay you $x to buy your creative output for a year, and you'll spend time at our offices on workdays."

The value of $x is what makes that onerous or not.

 

[Iosue]

Here's Stan!'s blog on the matter.

 

[ccooke]

It's been a component in every contract I've signed for the last decade or so. There are companies that attempt to claim everything that you produce while working there - I wouldn't sign a contract that said that. The ones I'll sign without anything other than a very careful read through* claim anything that's directly in the company's business.

In Monte Cook's case, though, he wanted to work on a direct competitor to WotC. It would be reasonable for Wizards to expect him not to work on such a thing while they paid him, IMHO, and his decision to leave and work on it was the only reasonable (and legal!) thing he could do.

And hey, it seems we all win, since Numenera is interesting and 5e doesn't seem to have been harmed (again, IMHO) by his departure.

* I've read two contracts that attempted to hide massive IP-grabs in what looked at first glance to be an entirely reasonable document. Always read the contracts through.

 

[Halivar]

If you don't mind my asking, what industry do you work in? And are there specific court cases that you're aware of where this was challenged?

I am a software developer. The idea is that that since I am exposed to company IP all day long, my work outside is "tainted" by it, also. I can imagine an RPG designer would have the same trouble.

Non-competition clauses of this kind are challenged all the time, with varying degrees of success. There are roughly two models in the US legal framework for how they go down: in Massachusetts, they are enforced almost 100%. If you sign the contract, a company can own your work for up to a year after you leave, depending on the contract. Meanwhile, in California, there are limits to enforcement. Specifically, when you change job titles in the same company, you have to sign a new non-compete or it's invalid. These two states are considered the extreme ends of the issue.

As for actual court cases, the most high profile is Microsoft vs. Lee, where Dr. Kai-Fu Lee left MS in 2005 to work for Google. Microsoft received a preliminary injunction against the hire, and Google settled. Note that this was in California, which is the most lax of all states with respect to non-compete enforcement.

 

[the Jester]

Was he working on it while he was actually at work? On the WotC clock, using his WotC provided computer?

Because if not, geez, that's an absurdly onerous stipulation in an employment contract. I can't imagine anyone would stick around for that... or even accept it in the first place in this industry.

I had a similar clause in my employment contract vis-a-vis document solution type innovations when I worked for Kinkos.

 

[Ahnehnois]

This kind of thing is de rigeur in the biomedical field, where if you work on creating drugs or medical devices, anything you create while employed at a company (or even a university) belongs to whoever owns your lab. To be fair, the investment required to do research is substantial, and the companies have an obvious interest in preventing you from trying to patent work that you supposedly did on your own time but which happened while you were using the infrastructure they set up for you.

While rpg writing hardly requires that size of investment from the parent company, I can see how they don't want people who have access to survey data and such that the company paid for using insights gained from that data to create products that the company does not profit from. Conversely, it's a free market, and I can see why a designer might rather freelance or run his own company that agree to be beholden to a parent company this way. No real villains in this scenario the way I see it; just everyone acting in their own interests.