Amazon Drops 'Draconian' Policy on Making Games After Work Hours (bloomberg.com) 48
Amazon.com withdrew a set of staff guidelines that claimed ownership rights to video games made by employees after work hours and dictated how they could distribute them, according to a company email. Bloomberg: The longstanding policies within Amazon Game Studios had drawn criticism on social media over the last month after a Google engineer posted about them. Some game developers described the rules as "draconian." The old policies mandated that employees of the games division who were moonlighting on projects would need to use Amazon products, such as Amazon Web Services, and sell their games on Amazon digital stores. It also gave the company "a royalty free, worldwide, fully paid-up, perpetual, transferable license" to intellectual property rights of any games developed by its employees.
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Re: Drop policies, or give me 3x salary (Score:2)
Ive quit jobs that pay over 250k salary, cold, without warning.
My ultimatum was that I was going to work remotely or else. Literally got told no so I took the else.
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What six figure salary? I assume Amazon is just as shitty of an employer as any other game developer.
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We're talking about positions where employees make massive amounts of money for employer, out of all proportion to wages, thousands or more to one. We're not talking about shelf stockers.
Re:And conversely... (Score:4, Interesting)
Which employee brings a thousand times as much revenue to their employer as they take home in salary or wages? That's just not a plausible number, even for the most spectacularly productive worker bee.
For someone making a rather pedestrian-for-software $100k/year, that would mean they personally were responsible for at least $100M/year in revenue. If that happens at all, it is so rare as to be a case only interesting as an anecdote on how not to negotiate one's compensation package.
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Simple, when developing Amazon's commonly used software and building infrastructure those employees do bring in thousands of times what their wages are. Funny you don't know that. It's same as automotive engineer and designer's salary compared to what the car sales bring in, thousands to one.
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Every example you mention involves dozens to thousands of other employees who are required to realize that revenue. When the revenue equal to thousands of salaries is brought in by thousands of employees, do you know what the profit margin is?
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You do realize Amazon's revenue for 2021 is going to be something like 400 billion USD? I was talking about people who engineer, design and make stuff that the millions of customers use and spend money on. Their wages are minute fraction of the money made off their brainpower.
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You do realize that AWS is a small fraction of Amazon's total revenue, and that revenue is only possible through massive capital investments by the company, right?
You still haven't answered my original question, except by asserting that a single unnamed software developer with an undisclosed but mediocre salary is somehow responsible for a disproportionate yet unspecified fraction of Amazon's revenue.
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False, AWS is 54 percent of revenue currently, look it up.
I have answered your question and you're too ignorant of how the world works to see it. The very small number of people who make the highly used software that runs significant things in the world get a tiny fraction of the worth of their creations as salary.
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I did look it up. AWS is 13% of revenue, according to both their first- and second-quarter (2021) earnings reports. You seem to be confusing operating income, which is one measure of profit, with revenue.
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So tens of billions of dollars of whatever accounting line item you want, made possible by a very small pool of software developers, systems architects, etc.
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How many thousands or tens of thousands of people are in that very small pool? Are Amazon's millions of servers and network switches and fiber optic connections also in there, or did you leave those out of the very small pool because of crowding and electric shock hazard?
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Physical gear of cloud service is worthless without software part of infrastructure. Less than 9K engineers and developers making that stuff at AWS.
So you don't know how things work in real world.
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That software also generates zero revenue without the hardware. That makes you ignorant of how things work in the real world, and a hypocrite who is terrible at math.
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Nope.
All that capital expenditure with multi-year service life would be useless without the creative efforts of the engineers and developers, just as sales and marketing would have nothing to sell.
It is the creations that make it all worth anything.
You truly are ignorant and shaming yourself.
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So Amazon makes revenue 400 billion.
For them to make 1000x an employee wage at 150k that's only spread over ~2500 employees.
It seems incredibly unlikely that they have 2500 employees bringing in all the money and the other 1.3 million or so are all dead weight.
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Which employee brings a thousand times as much revenue to their employer as they take home in salary or wages?
It's not unheard of. At 12 bucks an hour I used to make components for high frequency welding equipment that cost about $2 in materials but were sold for thousands. I'd literally make and ship hundreds of these each day netting easily 10k+ for the company while i got paid a measly 96 bucks before uncle sam takes his cut too.
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Ya, because Amazon cares *so* much about employee satisfaction and retention ...
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If anyone is curious, in the game industry, the policies on making games outside of work hours differ quite a bit by company. Some companies allow anything, some permit nothing, and others only require that they don't compete with the company's products. In my experience, it's relatively rare that companies permit nothing (like EA). But prior to this, I haven't actually seen a company that claimed *ownership* of games just because they were developed by employees. Most simply indicated such development
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Some companies claim ownership of all work that employees produce, even if it is not related to the employer's line of business and is created with no use of the employer's resources. IBM has, or at least used to have, just such a policy, famously expressed as "You are an IBM employee 100% of the time."
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Or you could create a game so abhorrent that Amazon wouldn't dare attach their name to it.
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As soon as programmers stop being, on average, little bitches, then these policies will change. Gaming away your teenage years doesn't help.
Sociopathic corporations will take every advantage they can get and if there's no reason not to abuse employees they will.
Even the HR lady will refuse to work on Sunday and sleep under her desk.
It Was Actually Even Worse Than That (Score:2)
You had to submit the financials of the game, number of installs, amount of revenue you made, and Amazon gave itself the right, but not the obligation, to assume ownership of your game. Basically, you get to take all the risk, pay for marketing and promotion , etc, but only if the game became successful would Amazon assert their supposed rights to your game.
It is not hyperbole. Amazon does not see you as an employee, they see you, and everything you create, as company property.
They used to have these camp
Think about what the word "salary" means (Score:2)
> give me 3x normal salary - if you're going to "own" me 24hrs/day
You might consider what the word "salary" means, and how it is different from an hourly wage or pay by the piece.
I don't know about you, but my salary IS more than 3X the average hourly wage, based on your thinking of getting paid only for time "worked". Essentially, I *am* getting paid while I sleep, while I'm on vacation, during holidays, weekends, etc.
Based on that, I'm okay with the fact that my employer pays for my work in a certain
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Well just don't join them if those are the terms. They can't spuriously add them in afterwards.
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Even in the civilised world, they can change contract terms with (varying) degrees of notice, and require you to accept the new contract or consider yourself voluntarily redundant.
But in any case, aren't the large majority of people working at Amazon single-employee companies on business-to-business contracts with no guarantee of continuation from day to day? In which case, most f
Already illegal in Washington. (Score:4, Informative)
RCW 49.44.140
Requiring assignment of employee's rights to inventions—Conditions.
(1) A provision in an employment agreement which provides that an employee shall assign or offer to assign any of the employee's rights in an invention to the employer does not apply to an invention for which no equipment, supplies, facilities, or trade secret information of the employer was used and which was developed entirely on the employee's own time, unless (a) the invention relates (i) directly to the business of the employer, or (ii) to the employer's actual or demonstrably anticipated research or development, or (b) the invention results from any work performed by the employee for the employer. Any provision which purports to apply to such an invention is to that extent against the public policy of this state and is to that extent void and unenforceable.
(There is more)
I thought Amazon was a Washington company, they had to know this.
It applies to copyrightable work as well.
Re:Already illegal in Washington. (Score:5, Insightful)
(a) the invention relates (i) directly to the business of the employer
It's a fair assumption that, legally speaking, developing a video game "relates directly to the business" of Amazon Game Studios.
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At this point in time, is there any field of human endeavor in which Amazon doesn't have it's grubby little fingers? No matter what your side gig I think they could make a fair case that it relates directly to their business.
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I think that's a fair statement, but not really relevant in this situation. The story is about, specifically, employees of Amazon Game Studios making games after hours. It's not like the guys who work on Route 53 being told they can't make Youtube videos because that would be a conflict with Prime Video or something similar.
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unless (a) the invention relates (i) directly to the business of the employer, or (ii) to the employer's actual or demonstrably anticipated research or development, or (b) the invention results from any work performed by the employee for the employer.
That is they key part. So yeah it isn't illegal as (i) (ii) apply.
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... unless (a) the invention relates (i) directly to the business of the employer, or (ii) to the employer's actual or demonstrably anticipated research or development...
Why do you think that exception doesn't apply?
Amazon Employee Handbook TOC update (Score:2)
- Draconian Amazon Employee Policies: Pages 1-499
- Non-Draconian Amazon Employee Policies: Page 500 (New!)
So what is their policy on other private creations (Score:2)
Say I worked for them. I write stories and music. Would they own all rights to that too?
That type of thing is something that shouldn't be legal in any way, shape, or form. If I'm doing it on my own time, not being paid by the company, and it's not something the company dictated, then what I do is mine. A company claiming ownership of anything the individuals working for them do outside of work is smacks of servitude. Amazon is literally saying they own this person, and everything they do is theirs with
well then on clock 24/7 or need to log time for ea (Score:2)
well then on clock 24/7 (we own all ownership) or need to log time for each work task.
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Scope of employment, release it open source (Score:2)
I don't know Amazon's policy, but in general if you were paid a salary (not an hourly wage or project pay) to write music, the music you write very often belongs to your employer, who paid you to do that.
On the other hand, if the company pays you a salary for your work in accounting, then a musical hobby wouldn't be within the scope of your employment.
Personally, I'm employed to create software security solutions. When I want to, I ask my boss (via email) to approve releasing th software or other deliverabl
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Yeah, this isn't generally an aggressive authoritarian move by companies, it's a risk management strategy.
I'm comfortable with my employer owning the ideas I have on how to improve their business and compete effectively in the market they're in, while they're paying me.
I refuse to let them have copyright over my videos, my photographs, my writing or my dance choreographies.
Quite normal in places... (Score:2)
... where "freedom", while being celebrated as the highest of all values, really means "corporate freedom". The freedom to exploit.
Because they're bound by the rules of the same economic system, other places are only gradually better, but some other places at least have laws preventing excesses like that.
24/7 contracts are unavoidable (Score:2)
At Google we had to sign 24/7 intellectual property agreements. Not because Google wanted ownership of our side-projects, but because it's the only way they could guarantee ownership of their own codebase.
Under existing copyright law, I don't think there's any other way to stop an employee logging in remotely on the weekend, submitting a change to, say, Gmail, and then claiming part-ownership of the product.
Getting an IP exemption was trivial, however. You just filed a ticket, and unless you were working fo
Is that even legal/enforceable? (Score:2)
Maybe it's just California, but I was under the general impression that if you work on something in your own time and don't use any company resources in the process, they have zero claim to it.
Something not a lot of devs think about. (Score:2)
This is just an example a lot of developers (or regular employee's) don't think about. Unless the contract explicitly says something about it, you have to be careful with what you do outside working hours in regards to creating stuff, especially if it's in line with what you do at work. As a developer who also creates software in his/her sparetime you must be very wary to have an agreement with your work about the ownership of what you create outside work, as your boss can lay claim on it without you being