Innovation narrows
Workers closest to real problems are often the first to see a better workflow, an overlooked market, or a missing product. Blanket bans turn that knowledge into silence.
A civic movement for independent makers
Personal invention should not need permission.
The Right to Build says workers should be free to publish personal apps, paid tools, software, and creative products under their own names when they do not steal company work, expose secrets, or misuse company time.
Right to Repair made a simple argument: ownership means little if the tools to fix what you own are kept behind a gate. Right to Build extends that same public-interest logic to the people who make software, products, and tools for a living.
Employment should not become a permanent claim on a person's curiosity. A company can protect its trade secrets without owning every useful thing an employee might imagine after work.
The case
The next small company is often born on a weekend.
Many employment contracts are written so broadly that a designer, developer, engineer, analyst, or operator has to ask permission before releasing anything that might someday make money. That power is usually defended as risk management. In practice, it can become a quiet veto over the public's next useful tool.
Ownership becomes lopsided
A paycheck should buy the work a person was hired to do. It should not buy a standing option on every unrelated idea they may develop on their own time.
The public pays the cost
Useful tools never launch, small businesses never form, and new categories never get tested because permission was easier to deny than define.
Principles
Build rights need guardrails, not blanket surrender.
Own your off-hours work
A person should be able to develop, publish, sell, and maintain personal products made outside assigned duties and outside company systems.
Respect confidential work
The right does not cover trade secrets, private roadmaps, customer data, unreleased research, source code, designs, or internal processes taken from an employer.
Define conflicts narrowly
A real conflict should be specific and explainable. "It might be useful to someone in our industry someday" is not enough.
Allow personal branding
Builders should not have to hide behind shell names or anonymous storefronts. Reputation is how good independent work finds trust.
Model language
A draft right that legislators, companies, and workers can argue from.
Right to Personal Building and Publication
An individual shall retain the right to independently create, publish, distribute, sell, license, support, and publicly identify with a personal software product, application, digital tool, creative work, or technical service, provided that such work is developed without use of the employer's confidential information, protected intellectual property, private customer data, or assigned working time.
No employer policy or agreement shall impose a blanket prohibition on unrelated personal products, nor require prior approval as a condition of publication, except where the employer states a specific conflict tied to the employee's assigned duties, the employer's active products, or legally protected information.
A lawful restriction must be narrow, written, timely, and capable of being understood before the individual builds. It may protect real business interests. It may not operate as a general claim over human curiosity, independent skill, public knowledge, or work created on a person's own time with their own resources.
What this is not
This is not a license to steal from work.
No company secrets
Private code, data, roadmaps, models, designs, and customer information stay protected.
No disguised employment
Work assigned by a company remains company work. The right covers independent building.
No sabotage or divided loyalty
Specific conflicts can be restricted when they are written clearly and tied to real risk.
A society that wants new technology cannot tell its builders to keep every personal invention in a drawer. The default should be permission to build, with clear limits where harm is real.
Join
Make the right obvious before it has to be fought in court.
The movement needs founders, employees, lawyers, lawmakers, investors, and company leaders willing to say that independent building is normal, healthy, and worth protecting.