"It's not just your basic human rights that get clipped. You know the inherent copyright rule that everything you create is yours? Not if you created it within your employment framework. As hired help, we lose any and all forms of authorship. Whatever we develop, design, formulate, innovate, write in a normal course of our paid work responsibilities belongs to the compensator. The re-using or duplicating your own prior achievements in any other business can be subject to litigations, which, at best, is throwing money into the wind and, at worst, will ruin your life.
Here's a classic pop-culture example that can make it clear for everyone. In 1982, Tim Burton, then employed by Walt Disney Feature Animation (a subsidiary of Walt Disney Studios), wrote a poem titled The Nightmare Before Christmas. Being who he is - I mean, an incredibly talented visual storyteller - he considered various possibilities of translating it into images: a TV special, a children book... He created the concept art, the storyboards, and even got Rick Heinrichs (a production designer on many subsequent Tim Burton's projects, as well as both Ghostbusters, all Pirates of the Caribbeans, etc.) to sculpt the character models... But Disney of the time (CEO E. Cardon Walker) deemed the project too "weird" and stalled it... Then, in his two-year stint as Disney's CEO (1983-1984), Ron Miller was more interested in creating the Touchstone, which allowed Disney to develop "grown-up" movies, than in Tim Burton's beautifully morbid ideas - he fired the auteur in 1984.
Thank God for that, because in the next eight years, Tim Burton went on creating Pee Wee's Big Adventure, Beetlejuice, Batman (all for WB), and Edward Scissorhands (for 20th Century Fox). Yet, the quasi-autobiographical turmoil and conflict between the strangeness of character and the desire to fit into the spirit of a "happy holiday" (never mind that it's Halloween) that he conceptualize for Jack Skellington have never really left Burton's creative horizons. Around 1990 he checked... And guess what? Disney still owned it. And by then it was already a Michael Eisner and Jeffrey Katzenberg's domain with the turf fertile for producing a full-feature Nightmare.
Oh, of course, they gave Tim Burton the creative credit - as the story and characters' developer. And they listed him as a producer... Why wouldn't they? His movies were already commercial and critical successes - the instant cult classics that, nevertheless, generated box office numbers in multiples of their budgets. Who wouldn't want to smack Tim Burton's name on a billboard? But it's not like he could take this child he conceived and labored to birth - his creation, and take it away to some place where he could nurture it. No... It was fostered now by people with no blood relations. They even didn't want to wait until the birth parent was free to play with it (he was committed now to Batman Returns at WB).... They hired their own nannies from within - a screen writer (Caroline Thompson) and a director (Henry Selick)...
Don't get me wrong: I love The Nightmare Before Christmas the way it ended up to be - the stop-motion animated musical with genius music and voice of Danny Elfman. Still, for 30 years now, I've been wondering: What it might've been if Tim Burton's parental rights were not terminated by the fact that he was paid a salary by Disney at the time of the authorship...
And as I said, the same rules apply to all achievements attained by a paid employee under the constriction of employment. Whether it's a product - either creative or physical, a formula, a solution, a process, a recipe, a construct, a logarithm, a program, an optimization matrix, an analytical macro, or a KPI dashboard - it does not belong to you just because you created it. It's in the possession of the people who paid you your wages. They are the ones who get to use and reuse it, whether you are still attached or separated from them."
Deleted from Chapter 4 - Bucket of Tears... and Blood