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It was at this point that I pulled up my Google employee contract, and looked *very* carefully at the IP ownership clause. As it turns out, I had missed a little detail. It was *obviously* modeled after CA labor code (even though I was in Ireland), but there was a difference.
CA labor code says, in pseudolegalese: You own THING you do on your own time without company equipment IF NOT ( THING relates to the company's business OR THING results from work you did for the company )
Since Google's business is basically everything technology, you do not own anything in practice. E.g. I was told that since Android has an audio server too, that the Pulseaudio patch was in scope and owned by Google.
However, my contract was worded differently: You own THING you do on your own time without company equipment IF ( NOT THING relates to the company's business OR NOT THING results from work you did for the company )
It is evident Google would do better to hire computer science graduates for lawyers, because whoever wrote that clearly didn't understand boolean logic and De Morgan's laws. This is wrong: ¬(𝑃 ∨ 𝑄) ⇎ (¬𝑃) ∨ (¬𝑄) The correct equivalence is: ¬(𝑃 ∨ 𝑄) ⇔ (¬𝑃) ∧ (¬𝑄)
And so, *as long as* whatever I did in my spare time and without using Google resources did not result from work I did for Google, it didn't matter one bit whether it "related to Google's business", which is the loophole they use to own everything you do.
And so I resolved to give zero shits from that point on about their IP ownership policies, and did whatever I wanted in my spare time. If you work for Google (Ireland especially) you should check your employment contract carefully. You might be able to do the same.
I hope Google's employees are able to unionize and this is one of the changes they should demand. No company should be able to own things you do in your spare time, especially if they don't relate at all to your job description (regardless of whether they do to someone else's).
It’s difficult to say; my experience at work was not at least a catalyst for my ideas. We’re quick to use our work at a past employer as justification for our experience which implies the employment was additive. So it’s all a tricky balance.
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