[citation][nom]Bob F[/nom]The owners in this country want to own you: your labor, your body, and your mind. It is ludicrous that people put up with these non-compete agreements. If we all agreed together not to sign them the corporate world would be SOL.United we stand, divided we fall.[/citation]
It's not just corporations either. Colleges, institutions setup to develop young minds into focused tools, assert the same control over their students. Anything created by a student belongs to the school. When you have to come up with that killer thesis project, don't over-do it, you still want something you can work on/market after you graduate.
These organizations promote and encourage new thinking and development of new ideas, then punish the individual when those ideas take them in a direction that dissagrees with the coporation (i.e. obviously Papermaster had a reason to leave IBM).
Papermaster may have enough in savings to live without working for a year, but how would most people survive, get a job in a completely unrelated field, while their skills degrade after a year of disuse? Sure, Papermaster shouldn't get to use IBM blue-prints or anything, but to say his experience is a threat is obsurd. Experience is all any employee ever has to market themselves.