Service inventions

mazfinn

I'm starting a new job with a company in Vienna soon and I've been given a contract to read through and sign. On there there's a part where it reads:

Service inventions
Future inventions of the Employee shall belong to the Employer. The Employee shall therefore be obliged to inform the Employer in writing immediately in the event that an invention is made. The Employer shall decide within four months whether to exercise the right to claim such invention and to exploit it and he shall be entitled in such case to submit patent applications at his own cost and to define the extent to which he proposes to exploit the invention. The Employee shall be obliged to complete all necessary formalities and to provide any signature and powers of attorney.

I've gone back to the employer and they have said that I don't need to worry as this only applies to developers and pretty adamant that they don't need to change it. My worry is that this portion of the contract is very vague and not specific such as working on the premises and whom and during the hours of etc. I think they have also confused Service Inventions with the Non-competition clause too which is also on the contract.

The role I'll be doing for them will be Marketing designer, I will be doing anything from designing for marketing material to building and development of website pages. Outside of work I have been building an app and designing and putting together some fonts which eventually I hope to sell or put on the apple store. None of the projects are conflicting with the industry I will be working for full-time. The app and fonts are my own personal projects.

Should I sign and work things out later, am I being over cautious? I just don't want any conflict later should anything that I do personally come to anything? Any advice and help would be much appreciated.

Manxman_in_exile

You'd probably need advice from a lawyer conversant with Austrian employment and intellectual property laws. Not sure how similar they are to UK.

TELLIT01

You do need to get legal advice on this. Logic suggests that you are only an employee during working hours and anything 'invented' during that time would reasonably become the property of the company.
Outside those hours any 'invention' should be your property. The problem arises if the company claims that your 'inventions' created outside working hours could only have been created by using knowledge acquired whilst working for them.

Les79

If you only have the 1 "invention" which you are worried about then maybe you could argue that such a contractual term would EXCLUDE that? The wording states "future inventions" which, to me, suggests they would have no claim on the work you've already started or "invented". But you may have to be up-front about that prior to signing, so that there isn't any ambiguity as to when it was "invented".

That being said, given this could POTENTIALLY be a really huge issue (for example, if your app makes shed loads of money in the future and your employer lodges a claim against the intellectual rights), I would certainly seek legal advice FIRST OF ALL.

If it was just a flappy bird skin, for example, I'd probably not worry too much

Marcon

mazfinn wrote: »

Should I sign and work things out later, am I being over cautious?

You're being wildly optimistic if you think that signing and working things out later is going to work in your favour! Get yourself proper advice from a professional who is conversant with the law to which your contract will be subject - your contract should stipulate which country this is. If it doesn't, it needs to!