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Suppose you are employed as a software developer. You work in a business where you code a lot of components. During this period, you also work as a freelancer to earn extra cash.

These freelance jobs may require some of the same code as you write for your day job.

The question: When are you allowed to reuse code that you wrote for (and is therefore owned by) your employer?

I think the Ship of Theseus paradox has some relation to this.

The ship of Theseus, also known as Theseus' paradox, is a thought experiment that raises the question of whether an object that has had all of its components replaced remains fundamentally the same object. The paradox is most notably recorded by Plutarch in Life of Theseus from the late first century. Plutarch asked whether a ship that had been restored by replacing every single wooden part remained the same ship.

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    Note that many employers avoid this tricky issue by broadly claiming that they claim copyright on any copyrighted work you produce that could be construed as being related to your job (unless expressly exempted by the company), or by disallowing outside employment.
    – apsillers
    Commented May 10, 2016 at 14:49
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    @apsillers Correct. However even if you change employment there may be a time where the code is identical to some of the code you wrote for the old company. is that considered a break in the copy right?
    – Marc Rasmussen
    Commented May 10, 2016 at 15:45
  • @apsillers there's also the question of the degree so which copyright protection applies to any given piece of code. Small pieces of code (planks?) don't enjoy copyright protection, but larger pieces (ships) do. A function such as fun isEven x = x % 2 == 0 isn't owned by anybody.
    – phoog
    Commented Mar 29, 2023 at 6:57

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It really comes down to the licensing of the code, the context of what you built, how you built it and when something is built.

Think about it like this. If you used your previous jobs resources (like a company laptop). Then they can claim anything produced on that laptop belongs to them.

If you built something on company time but used your own resources. It may also belong to them if they were paying you during those hours.

If you used an open source library like Next.js to build a custom application for job1. Your job1 doesn't own the Next.js library. You can switch to job2 and still build on top of that library. However, use of any of the customized application code built from or for job1, might open the door for claims against what ever you are building for job2.

Open Source

Your best approach to avoiding legal issues across jobs is to open source any of the code you plan to reuse and implement a code license that allows you to use, modify, or distribute software code freely.

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  • "they can claim anything produced on that laptop belongs to them": only if it is something they can own. Pieces of code (or anything else) that are not protected by copyright (got example because they are too small) do not belong to them because they are not intellectual property.
    – phoog
    Commented Mar 29, 2023 at 7:00
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The code you write as an employee belongs to your employer in most normal circumstances. It isn’t yours it’s theirs.

Without permission you have no right to do anything with it outside work.

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  • This isn't true in all situations. You could work for an employer who allows for open source contributions while being employed by them. This code would not be owned by the employer.
    – Digital fire
    Commented Mar 28, 2023 at 16:54
  • This depends on your employment contract/policies and local labor law. One notable example is that universities often have contracts that do not claim IP rights where university funding/resources were not used, hence the large number of university spin-offs.
    – user71659
    Commented Mar 28, 2023 at 20:50
  • True but more likely to apply to a student or faculty than an employee. The OP uses the word “business” and I said “most normal circumstances.” In most business employment situations you get paid and the entity that pays you owns the results of your assigned work for them. No ship of Theseus analogy at all.
    – George White
    Commented Mar 28, 2023 at 22:56
  • It would be more precise to say that the intellectual property in code you write as an employee belongs to your employer. The ship of Theseus analogy becomes useful in light of the fact that a copyright-protected computer program (or literary work) can be broken down into parts that are all so small as to be ineligible for copyright protection.
    – phoog
    Commented Mar 29, 2023 at 7:04

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