Employee IP agreement for P.R.China

[0xDing]

Our legal team has draw up a version of BEIPA that applies to the laws of the People's Republic of China. And, we are willing to release to the public domain under CC0-1.0.

If anyone is interested in it, please click brickdoc/balanced-employee-ip-agreement for the full article.

[mlinksva]

@0xDing thanks for sharing! A couple questions, if/when you/your team could answer:

• What are the key substantive differences between your version for the laws of the People's Republic of China and BEIPAv1?
• How does your version differ from typical employee IP agreements used in the People's Republic of China?

[0xDing]

@0xDing thanks for sharing! A couple questions, if/when you/your team could answer:

• What are the key substantive differences between your version for the laws of the People's Republic of China and BEIPAv1?
• How does your version differ from typical employee IP agreements used in the People's Republic of China?

In Chinese judicial practice, Employee IP agreement is usually only applicable to the Civil Code and not to criminal law. So, the agreement must contain an indemnified losses clause to be binding. And, As a country that applies the civil law system, general agreements in China need to be referred to as "Party A" and "Party B" As Party-Name Defined Terms.

Typical employee IP agreements used in China generally require that any intellectual property rights arising from the use of equipment, premises, or other resources provided by the company belong to the company. For example, if you develop open source non-lethal mousetrap simulation software in office using a company owned computer and network, then the intellectual property rights are owned by the company.

[mlinksva]

Thanks @0xDing. Regarding:

the agreement must contain an indemnified losses clause to be binding

Could you point out which clauses accomplish this? 5-7? Reading through autotranslation, they look a bit scary for the employee (Party B), though perhaps autotranslation is not good, and I admittedly don't know what the baseline is.

Typical employee IP agreements used in China generally require that any intellectual property rights arising from the use of equipment, premises, or other resources provided by the company belong to the company.

Again skimming an autotranslation, it looks like it doesn't mention equipment, etc. Under Chinese law, does this mean the rights to non-job work go to the employee by default, even if performed on company equipment?

Apologies for these naive questions, and thanks again for sharing your work here!