How the hell can that be legal? That would be the legal equivalent to a person working in a factory and doing the same stuff as hobby at home not owning the products he made at home.
Doesn’t this infringe at least a few universal human rights? o.O
It is not accurate. Your employer owns all intellectual property you create on or off work (meaning you technically can't contribute to Wikipedia or most open source projects) and even owns the bedtime stories you make up to tell your children, but ONLY if you sign a contract saying so.
By pointing out the above cases I have gotten an employer (not in NY) to alter the language of their IP contract.
There's a big difference between hourly and salaried positions. It's harder to define "off the clock" when no one is actually clocking you in the first place.
A different way to put it would be that it is based in the way that U.S. law allows you to sue anyone for any "damages," real or imaginary, only proving that you got hurt. Any potential employee can have an idea that is derived from trade secrets or other material not meant for people outside of an organization, and it's not possible to simply turn off this ability or create a distinction between ideas that are completely independent from that information or not. Because of this, it's possible to incur some level of damage to an employer with an idea that was technically had at any time of day.
Doesn’t this infringe at least a few universal human rights? o.O