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Full-Text Articles in Law
Whose Invention Is It Anyway? Employee Invention-Assignment Agreements And Their Limits, Parker A. Howell
Whose Invention Is It Anyway? Employee Invention-Assignment Agreements And Their Limits, Parker A. Howell
Washington Journal of Law, Technology & Arts
Pre-invention assignment provisions have become important and commonplace facets of employment agreements, supplanting common law rules for invention ownership. Yet statutes in seven states—including California, Washington, and Minnesota—restrict invention assignment. These statutes make agreements unenforceable when a worker invents on his or her own time without use of employer resources and the invention does not relate to the employer’s business or the employee’s work. Employers should be ready to argue why a given invention is not excluded from assignment by statute, although judicial decisions suggest many disputed inventions nonetheless belong to the employer. Statutory arguments notwithstanding, employee-inventors may challenge the …
Facebook Firings And Twitter Terminations: The National Labor Relations Act As A Limit On Retaliatory Discharge, Bryan Russell
Facebook Firings And Twitter Terminations: The National Labor Relations Act As A Limit On Retaliatory Discharge, Bryan Russell
Washington Journal of Law, Technology & Arts
In every state except Montana, at-will employment is the default rule, leaving employers free to discharge employees for their use of social media. The National Labor Relations Act’s (NLRA) protection of collective action, however, is emerging as a substantial limitation to at-will terminations. In Hispanics United of Buffalo, the National Labor Relations Board concluded that Facebook posts critical of the non-profit employer were protected as collective action and that the employer’s retaliatory termination of five employees violated Section 8 of the NLRA. To be protected as collective action under the NLRA, an employee’s use of social media must be …