Computer furnished to you by the Company?

[andres-mendez-b]

2. What the Company doesn't own. If you create IP outside the scope of your employment or contract or before or after your employment or contract ("Your IP"), the Company doesn't own it. This is true regardless of the computer you use to develop Your IP, including the one furnished to you by the Company.

I think the computer that the employee uses to develop his personal side project is relevant for a number of reasons:

1.- Imagine you work in an office and use the corporate desktop to write your side project outside of working hours (during your lunch, or after EOB). Imagine you're called by your Manager and he notifies you that you are fired. After that, you are not allowed to use your desktop anymore (IT has probably disabled your user account). If you want to get a copy of what you had on your computer the Manager will have to allow you to do it, and if you are leaving on bad terms that can be problematic.

2.- Imagine that you work from home, with a corporate laptop running, connected to the corporate Active Directory. If you are fired, you can't login again. You have the laptop at home, but you can't access your code.

3.- Imagine that you want to develop an Apple iOS application, but you don't have money for the required software license. Or you want to develop using a development tool which has an expensive license. I don't think the employer will be very happy seeing that you use paid tools for your personal benefit.

4.- How are you going to extract the personal IP from the corporate computer? Are you going to connect a USB to extract it, are you going to upload it to your personal Dropbox? Are you going to send it by email as an attachment?
From a cybersecurity perspective, all these are situations that your Security Team may have restricted, or your security corporate policies won't allow you to do.

Honestly, there are more cons than pros to using a corporate computer while developing your personal IP. I would discourage using a corporate computer for any personal purpose.

For these reasons I recommend removing that idea about using the corporate laptop for your personal side projects, or give two options and let the company choose:
a) What the employer can include in the terms if they're ok about using corporate computers for this.
b) What to include if they don't want corporate computers (or corporate resources) used for personal side projects.