For people in your position, I like Van Lindberg's book, Intellectual Property and Open Source: A Practical Guide to Protecting Code.

https://www.oreilly.com/library/view/intellectual-property-a...

It will help you understand the relevant parts of the law (copyright, patent, trademark) as well as helping to differentiate between various types of Open Source licenses.

Agreed. Nolo books are very basic.

The following is much better and does talk about many corner cases. It also is written specifically for the software-development case.

http://www.amazon.com/Intellectual-Property-Open-Source-Prot...

The book is written by software developers turned lawyers, and provided me with some fresh perspectives on the nature of the law itself.

Legally speaking, merely mentioning it to your boss does not necessarily shield you from a lawsuit. It certainly reduces the likeliness though in my opinion (i.e., have no data).

Further, "employer's line of business" is very loosely defined. If you could share the technical skills between your job and the side project, you are most likely in the same line of business.

Here's a book I highly recommend: http://www.amazon.com/Intellectual-Property-Open-Source-Prot...

It depends deeply on the project. Some something like, say, an HTTP API wrapper module, MIT/BSD style licenses are quite sufficient. There shouldn't be something patentable there. Apache, unfortunately, isn't compatible with GPL v2.

But if you're building something like node.js, nginx, or Lucene, choosing MIT/BSD is likely a terrible idea. Apache gives huge protections for unforeseen scenarios: automatic property rights assignment for contributions, poison-pill–like protections against patent suits, &c.

I highly recommend this book on Proprietary Information and Open Source: http://www.amazon.com/Intellectual-Property-Open-Source-Prot...

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Aside — Sean, I took your CS101 class in '07. Crazy running into you randomly here ;)

This may be a bit more than you're looking for, but Van Lindberg's book, Intellectual Property and Open Source, is pretty good: https://www.amazon.com/Intellectual-Property-Open-Source-Pro...

I found this to be an excellent resource for this topic.

http://www.amazon.com/Intellectual-Property-Open-Source-Prot...

While this has "open source" in the title, it's still an excellent book related to this topic.

Another good thing about this book is that it draws analogies between software source code and law statutes, making it very easy for software folks to understand these legal issues.

For anyone who wants to learn more about the nature of IP: Patents, Trade Secrets, Trademarks, Copyrights, Licensing, I recommend this book: http://oreilly.com/catalog/9780596517960.

I read it about 6 months ago, it will give you some clarity of thought about these matters. And apart from the odd gratuitous computer metaphor it is quite minimal -- you could probably use it as a reference if necessary.

This book has 2 chapters on patents: http://oreilly.com/catalog/9780596517960

I read the first half of the book and found it enlightening.