Stop using your work laptop or phone for personal stuff, because I know you are

• balanced-employee-ip-agreement

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  GitHub's employee intellectual property agreement, open sourced and reusable

  

I think this is reasonable advice, in some settings. But for many of us, I think it’s just not practical anymore.

The lines have become too blurred. I work from home, I have one office and one desk. The computer on the desk was purchased by my company but other stuff wasn’t like my mouse or my iPad. I have work Slack on my phone, which is my personal phone.

Granted, I work for a startup. This isn’t a company IT department managed laptop. It’s a MBP they had shipped directly from Apple to me.

The GitHub Balanced Employee IP Agreement acknowledges that this distinction is arbitrary and unhelpful:

> In California the main difference made by BEIPA is that IP developed with company equipment or relating to the company's business, but in an employee's free time and which the employee is not involved in as an employee, is not owned by the company (but the company does get a non-exclusive and unlimited license if the IP relates to the company's business). This recognizes that from the employee perspective, segregating one's life activities based on ownership of devices at hand or relatedness to an employer's potentially vast range of business that an individual employee is not involved with as an employee imposes significant cognitive overhead and often doesn't happen in practice, whatever agreements state.

- https://github.com/github/balanced-employee-ip-agreement

I hope that more employee agreements move this direction so we can stop trying to enforce this distinction.

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