From the full letter[1]:

> Our Free Time is Our Own: Currently, if an employee makes anything creative in their free time, with their own resources, Hasbro may claim ownership. What we do in our free time should not be dictated by the company; neither should what we make in our free time be owned by the company.

How common is this in creative fields?

From my perspective this seems outlandish. Imagine doing FOSS work or a side project on your personal computer and your company tries to claim it. Odd...

[1]: https://unitedwizardsofthecoast.com/letter

Most employment agreements for tech companies have a clause that says that the employer owns everything you do while you’re working for them. And if you’re on salary, as opposed to working by the hour, there really is no “free time.” In practice no company is going to go after you for anything that is non-competitive, and doubly so if it’s also open source work. But yea, if you’re inventing competitive products in your “spare” time, companies could go after you.

Common enough even in tech that I've both had contracts try to demand this, and had contracts explicitly rule it out being presented as evidence of how great the company was.

It's not at all uncommon, and important.

When someone is empowered to work remotely, and is salaried and not held to specific hours, then it's very hard to identify what work is "theirs" and what work is "the company's" in a legally consistent way. Yes, it's usually obvious from context, but context doesn't always carry to a court of law. It can be particularly messy because the kinds of open source projects one contributes to often overlap with the work they do in their day job.

So most companies which are salaried and allow WFH will usually ask employees to explicitly list any project they work on which they don't want owned by the company, with the expectation being that everything unlisted is owned by the company. It's a bit cumbersome, but generally the least bad option.

At our company we have a form to file if we do work outside of hours on OSS or pet projects, and to the best of my knowledge nobody has ever had their application denied.

edit: it's important because it's symmetric - not only does this define what _isn't_ property of the company, it defines what _is_. So if you come up with a clever solution to a problem for a company purpose and introduce it into an OSS project, it doesn't come back to haunt the company.

Can't speak for creative fields, but it's remarkably common in tech. It was tolerable when wages meant we could afford rent or possibly a home and job security was excellent, but that's no longer the case, and thus folks are starting to push back on that excessive overreach.

See also "anti-moonlighting" and "anti-social media" clauses. Hell, I've seen the odd story of folks being fired/disciplined for their dating profiles before. If the government doesn't tell them no, companies will take every inch they can get.

My first job after finishing my undergrad degree was performing quality analysis on corn starch. As a condition of employment, I had to sign a paper saying anything I invented related to corn was property of my employer.

It's extremely common in lots of creative and technical fields. It is usually restricted to work related to the employer's field and the employee's function, but one could imagine some employers of folks in the creative arena being a bit more... expansive in their interpretation.

This is common in Germany at least in the scope of patents and inventions. That is, if you make any invention at have it patented or market it outside of your job, your employer owns that patent and the profits ("Arbeitnehmererfindungen"). Luckily, a slow beaurocratic government works sometimes in our favour, as they never updates the law to apply to software, and software is not patentable in Germany or the EU - so we can work on side projects in software without that affecting us. But if you are a mechanical engineer, you are screwed.

When I was looking for my last job a company wanted me to sign something similar to that. I declined their offer and got a job elsewhere instead.

I feel like that's .. the reasonable take here? If you don't agree to their conditions, then .. just don't work there?

every IT and dev gig I've been at / around basically said "anything you create is ours and we have ROFR on any LLCs or companies you found"

in practice that is either unenforceable or else a giant waste of the company's money, but it's CYA in case someone doing engineering or creative work decides to rip it off elsewhere.

like Meta ain't gonna try to steal your local cupcakes at the farmer's market side gig

A clause like this is pretty standard in software company employment contracts, at least in the California/Silicon Valley zone. There’s sometimes an exception for explicitly named items that pre-date your employment but sometimes they try to claim ownership of stuff you made before joining the company too.

Google has a similar clause in their employee contracts. I assume most tech companies do.

That doesn't mean it is enforceable, though.

I've seen it in a couple software developer contracts here in Norway. I find it despicable and have always gotten it removed from any contract before signing. I don't get why it's even legal to have in contracts. I certainly hope it's unenforceable.

Unfortunately IP assignment agreements are very common, even in non-creative roles and fields. Many many many companies have overly-broad employment agreements in the US, mostly because they know few people will challenge it and that the legal protections for workers are basically nothing. I personally will never sign an IP assignment agreement that isn't explicitly scoped to apply only to work hours and company-provided equipment. What I do on my own time with my own equipment is my own business.

Pretty common actually.

It’s called “broad assignment of IP.” Some jurisdictions disallow that clause.

And then of course there is the distinct but thematically similar anti-moonlighting clause.

Overreaching but common. Like most things, lawyers will take as much as they can possibly get.