似たような話は日本のゲーム業界でもある、と以前聞きました。で、転職する側は競合会社に移る際には「家業を継ぐことになりまして...」とか誤魔化してしまうそうです。ばれたら訴訟騒ぎになることも覚悟の上とか。

こういった契約条件は人権を踏みにじるものに思えるのですが、いったいどうなってるんでしょうね。

ごめんね、なまけものなので今日英語で説明する。

First off, this above happened in Canada, not the U.S.A.

As for the U.S.A., each state has it's own laws about non-compete clauses. Basically, most (if not all states) allow a non-compete clause during employment. In other words, while you are working for the company you cannot also be working for one of their competitors (or be one yourself).

After you quit it varies by state. For example in California non-compete clauses are basically illegal.

But, there are other laws and they arguably make sense in some situations. For example if you are a sales person it would not be cool if you could take all the customers you have relationships with to another company.

Another example, a company hires you and basically trains you for a year or more, you then quit and take that training somewhere else screwing the company out of a year or more of salary.

In California, some of those issues are covered under other laws. For example laws about stealing trade secrets might cover the sales person example.

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Good point, those crazy Canadians... ;-)

But I've heard about this stuff going on in America all the time. (do a search on slashdot and you'll get several articles about it).

The training issue is interesting but that's just a risk you've got to take I think. The important thing is for the company to try to　gain respect and loyalty from the employee whilst he's training so he doesn't feel the urge to leave though, not try to chain people down.

By the way, write links in url format (not html), ie. h-t-t-p://www.q-games.com (the hyphens are so it won't get converted in this comment, don't put them in yours)

It gets converted to look like this:

www.q-games.com

There is a thread about that on CG Channel;

www.cgchannel.com