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Consider the following scenario:

Person A is employed by a large company and has the usual "everything you do while employed by us is owned by us" in their employment contract.

Person B is self-employed and creates intellectual property (here let's assume software) in the natural course of their business.

They both work from the same home and use a shared home internet connection (for which only one of them, let's assume person A, is the official account holder).

Is there a risk that person A's employer can attempt to attach themselves to person B's business or the intellectual property created by person B's business?

For example, if B uploads intellectual property to a third-party service using the same IP address that A uses, can A's employer use that fact as evidence that B's intellectual property might have been created by A or with A's involvement?

How does the law look at this situation?

bdb484
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confused-by-it-all
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3 Answers3

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It is conceivable that A's employer would claim that the intellectual property was actually created by A in the course of their employment rather than B. That would be a question of fact for the lawsuit to determine.

Realistically, assuming A and B both testify that B created the intellectual property with no input from A and A's employer had only the IP address as evidence, it is pretty unlikely that the fact finder would find that A created the intellectual property. A's employer would almost certainly need to provide some additional evidence that would show that the balance of probabilities favored the employer's position (i.e. A works at FedEx writing software for package logistics, B is a 12 year old kid with no formal computer science training, and the intellectual property in question involves the implementation of sophisticated graph traversal algorithms that would be common in package logistics applications).

Justin Cave
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I would not be too worried about Company A making a claim over company B's intellectual property because your wife sent something over the shared home network. I would more concerned if your Company A and your wife's company B were competitors or in the same line of business. If that is so, you could open yourself up to trade secret or confidentiality legal actions.

I have been a lawyer in Silicon Valley for over 25 years. There are certain companies that rigorously defend their trade secrets and will sue former employees in the flimsiest of cases. After you have spent thousands of dollars defending yourself they settle with you for an apology having taught you "a lesson".

If your employer believes you may have leaked trade secrets I could see them filing a law suit connected to the shared home network. You are a computer expert. So you know the solution to this better than I do. Interesting question. Thank you.

jdblaw
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I am not a lawyer but from the technical aspect, it does not make much sense.

A company that allows you to work remotely ensures that your work environment is secure. This can roughly be done though

  • providing you with a complete network connected to the company (this is typical for small branch offices, but also doable at home)
  • or making sure that your device (typically a laptop) is secure when on a generic network

In the first case, you are alone on the network built by the company that connects to the company so it is an extension of what they have. This network "lays" on top of the home network, and then the Internet. The home network and Internet are just transport - so if a company states that this contributes to the IP they should sue the Internet, the providers of the tunnels the cables run through, and the vendors of the fiber.

In the second case, the laptop is expected to be secure and appropriately isolated so you are back to the "transport layers" above.

In other words - where you do not matter because the way the IP flows in is independent of the network it ultimately is. The company provides the appropriate security padding so that it does not matter.

WoJ
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