On March 20 of this year,  Mike Rosen, one of our Partners, wrote a post in his blog on the subject of the pending noncompetition legislation in Massachusetts. A lot of folks in the Mass entrepreneurial community have been pushing for a legislative ban on noncompetes similar to that enacted many years ago in California.

As Mike notes, legislation on noncompetes in Massachusetts took a step forward. When it, or if, it will pass remains to be seen. 

I am generally in favor of the legislation. I don’t see how it can hurt the tech community to get rid of this restraint on freedom of enterprise. 

But, I hasten to add that I am not particularly excited about the issue. Let’s look at what the law is in California. Certain noncompetes (employment related ones) were made illegal by statute. OK, that sounds great but… consider the basic elements of protection that a company might want from a noncompete. 

First and foremost: Don’t solicit my customers. Well, nonsolicits are not illegal in California (and no one is proposing to make them illegal in Massachusetts).

Second and secondmost: Don’t solicit my employees. Well, employee nonsolicits are not illegal in California (and no one is proposing to make the illegal in Mass).

Third and thirdmost (I guess I should give up with this rhetorical device before I get to sixth and sixthmost):   Don’t disclose (or use) my proprietary IP. Well, NDAs are perfectly fine in California. Does anyone think they should not be?

Fourth: If an employee invents something on company time or using company resources – should it belong to the company? Well, that is what the typical inventions agreement provides. 

You get the idea. It is like a venn diagram. There is a circle in the middle called noncompetition and there are many overlapping circles called NDA, nonsolicit, inventions and whatnot. If there is any part of the noncompetition circle that is not covered by one or another circle , it ain’t very big.

My point is that making employment related noncompete’s illegal won’t change much. Even Bijan Sabet (who says he tries to avoid noncompetes - see the end of his post on east coast term sheets) probably asks for all these other things (maybe he will comment here and set me straight by saying that he doesn’t go for non-solicits etc.). I could be wrong.

Many people in the tech community (myself included) think getting rid of noncompetes is a good idea, but it is not worth a ton of effort, and we got way bigger fish to fry – like net neutrality.