In one hell of bizarre news, Amazon had a policy that allowed them to basically steals Employees’ personal game projects. However, that has been rectified!
According to Game World Observer, James Liu, a software engineer at Google, has shared a piece of Amazon’s employment contract. The post went viral due to some rules the company allegedly has regarding creating your personal games as a hobby. Essentially, it read that if you were to create a game while working for them, they would own the right to your game. Many devs were discussing it on Twitter and well, it went semi-viral. Some employees found it ok, while others didn’t agree with this clause.
Truth be told, if you read your own job contract, there’s something like this as well. Heck, I remember when I read my job’s contract and it had something similar as well. That if you created anything, it would kinda belong to them.
Anyways, after the backlash, Amazon.com Inc. withdrew the guidelines that claimed ownership rights to video games made by employees after work hours. According to Bloomberg, “These policies were originally put in place over a decade ago when we had a lot less information and experience than we do today, and as a result, the policies were written quite broadly,” Mike Frazzini, the Amazon Game Studios boss, wrote in the email to staff.
Let me know what you guys think? Should employees retain the right of their own projects while working for another company of those it fall within the right of the employer to seize the project.
