Perhaps instead of that, they should give you a list of inventions which they own and you sign that, and anything else that you come up with on your own time is yours.
It's ultimately about power. You rely upon the company for sustenance, it doesn't rely upon you. That manifests in contractual terms which are basically designed to give the company license to completely screw you.
Perhaps instead of that, they should give you a list of inventions which they own and you sign that, and anything else that you come up with on your own time is yours.
If the "list everything you've ever done" argument is reasonable, then the logical counter is actually rather stronger than that.
The true equivalent would be that the company must list all inventions and IP they have ever created in their history, including before you joined. Rights to anything they don't list automatically belong to you as the new employee, even if it was created on a work PC during working hours as a result of an employee's current job and the employee was duly paid for it. And if the employer then inadvertently grants rights to one employee and then the same rights to another one later, as they will for any invention or other IP they forgot to list, they are legally on the hook for any damages when it turns out they couldn't actually grant the rights the second (and third, and fourth...) time. Finally, employees are not required to accept any new items the company wants to add to its list of claimed inventions and IP, even if the new item is entirely created by staff on company time and using company resources.
I think it's fair to say you'd have trouble finding a company lawyer who advised their client to accept that kind of term. And yet companies attempt to impose the equivalent on their employees all the time.
It's ultimately about power. You rely upon the company for sustenance, it doesn't rely upon you. That manifests in contractual terms which are basically designed to give the company license to completely screw you.