According to reports, Amazon has discarded a policy that claimed property rights of any game that employees created outside of work. Under the previous rules, the company required employees to use Amazon products while working on personal projects and distributing those games in their shop windows.
Those policies are instead, according to Bloomberg. In an email to the staff seen by the publication, Amazon Game Studios Head Mike Frazzini said the company was dropping the rules immediately. “These policies were originally established in a decade ago, when we had much less information and experience than today, and as a result, the policies were written with quite broad,” wrote Frazzini. Engadget has been contacted Amazon to comment.
Amazon received a reaction on the rules after an engineer who interviewed in the company revealed Amazon’s personal games policy. The rules awarded Amazon “a royalty-free license, completely, completely, perpetual, transferable” to the intellectual property of the games that their employees set out. The policy was decided as “draconian” by some developers when a tweet now eliminated from the engineer won the traction.
However, Amazon is not the only company that has enacted such a policy. Google has also been accused of claiming the ownership of the external projects of employees.
