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Intellectual Property Issues In College?
An Anonymous Coward with PhD prospects asks: "Next week several people from our computer science department will be meeting with the intellectual property lawyers who represent my university. The intent of the meeting is to get their opinions on various topics like: work for hire, UCITA, taking grad theses and selling them, and so on, and to grill them on the same. Many of us feel that we should have the right to GPL any code we produce, but the university makes lots of money off of licensing. They argue that code written by a school employee (and this usually includes grad students) is a work for hire and that the school should retain ownership and control. What do /. people think and can you all come up with other questions that I should ask?"
U of Helsinki couldn't have the kind of policies US universites have or are proposing, because that would violate the Finnish copyright law.
In my opinion all software and scientific results of employees and students of publicly funded universities should be made public domain by state law. That would settle the dispute, and the universities would concentrate on serving the interests of science and the public.
While I prefer GPL myself, I think it is contradictory for university employees to claim copyright to their work and at the same time deny it to their employers.
Marko
I run a small Research and Development office for Indiana University. I had to deal with issues like this just a few months ago.
:-)
One of my employees was finishing up her senior year and asked her department chair to allow her to do her Senior Thesis based on work she was doing for my department. No problem on my end, but I told her she could count on me not helping much as this would count for her accademic goals. Normally I throw libraries that I've built over the years and rebuild my employees code up to my spec, but I kept this as a dual development process to avoid any problems she might have.
Two months after she graduates, I get a note from a friend telling me that her department is using the software we paid her for, and in turn charge the rest of the university for. I estimate we paid probably $15k over the year for her services. This department, with a much bigger budget now claims that they have the legal right to use the software as it was a Senior Project and her prof is now offering it to other departments and claiming it is his code.
Anywho, we had to pull up an outside arbitrator to get all this stuff straightened out. The School claims that even though we paid for it, her academic department is welcome to use this, can sell it, and the jerk that was her advisor is now claiming that it was his idea and actually programmed a good deal of this himself (heh...I hope he's reading this...) when I know for a fact the man is pretty much clueless when it comes to this type of programming - I've had to stop by his office on several occasions to get this software working for her because he didn't even know how to properly set up his server, let alone design an app like this.
Anywho, its a big problem. Universities think they own anything programmed by their students. The big claim was that the department puts in a lot of 'outside' help to teach these students. I actually thought part of the money you paid for classes went to being able to get outside help...not that anywas given in this instance...I had most of this profs class coming to my office asking for help. I'm just glad I didn't have this student doing anything for any of the companies I regularly consult for or they would have 'legally' tried ripping this from us as well.
Word to the wise, if you are doing anything that you don't want the university to own, do it on your own computers, don't show it to any professors, don't transmit it over university email systems, don't do anything that has anything to do with the university. Do some bullshit projects, do some semilegit research kinda parallel to what you really want to do, and do the rest on yor own time.
Ok, its time to do the Anonymous Post thing because while my boss agrees with me, we have to deal with idiots all across campus, and I have to deal with people who are actually pretty damn intelligent that might also get caught up in the crossfire. Sad isn't it...and this might have made up for some of the Flamebait Points I lost yesterday
I think it should be owned by the person that created it, especially if you are paying to be there.
If they claim that you are 'hired' and thus it's their code...ask for your tuition back and a pay check.
P-
A friend of mine told me about a similar situation going on at the University of New Mexico (could be the same situation actually, yeah for anonymity!). The school wants to have it's name on student work and decide where it goes so if it turns profitable they can have a piece or at least be recognized for their part in the development. According to idle speculation at UNM, this is because somebody at UNM played a big part in the development of Matlab while they were a grad student and now Matlab is a huge program that UNM gets nothing from. Whether that's true or not I don't know but if I were a lawyer/bean-counter at UNM, that would chap my hide a bit.
I think this will be more and more of an issue at big 'U's in the coming years as more and more schools sell their research work for millions and millions of dollars. If this school is allowed to put it's name on research done there, expect most/all research to move from schools to companies before too long.
A grad student pays to go to school...
I didn't, and most comp. sci. grad students don't. Instead they get some sort of assistanceship or fellowship. If it is a research assistanceship, they help work on a professor's project for ostensibly 20 hours a week, and do schooling in the rest of their time.
In this case, it is quite reasonable for the work done on assistanceship time for the research project to be considered "work for hire", where by default ownership automatically transfers to the hirer. I believe this is the default for U.S. employment.
Note, however, this is completely unrelated to being a student, or work done outside the sphere of the specific research assistanceship project. The sole claim the university may have to that is if its facilities are used for that work, and that's a much more tenuous claim.
(All this is U.S. only, YMMV)
Ooh, a sarcasm detector. Oh, that's a real useful invention.
Do students get cash for writing this programs, or do they have to pay less for the school if they code for the school ?
As a graduate student, I had the possibility of a teaching assistanceship, a research assistanceship, or a fellowship. Any of the three would pay my tuition plus a (low, but livable) stipend (effectively, a salary.)
Undergraduate students rarely if ever get paid, although tuition can be reduced or free from various scholarships.
Ooh, a sarcasm detector. Oh, that's a real useful invention.
Point out to them that insisting that you're working for hire means you're employees, and therefore entitled to organize. If they're antsy about grad-student unions, that might be an effective stick.
Then again, the recent NLRB decision may may lead them to believe it's a lost cause, and they'll just take the unionization hit to claim your work---it depends on how badly they foam at the mouth thinking of organized students.
I refuse to believe corporations are people until Texas executes one. -- desert rain on http://www.dailykos.com/user/
IANAL, so this might not work:
When working on your graduate projects, make sure to link GPL code into the project. Use some GPL'ed library for something or another (I was going to use the Mersenne Twister code as an example, but I realized it's LGPL. Oops.) and then if the college ever wants to profit from your code, they have to make the source availible. Doesn't give you any profits from your code, but it effectively sticks a poison pill in it so that the College doesn't get all that much either.
InThane
This is a very practical suggestion, typically there are far fewer restrictions on your implementation strategies when you are working at a University towards a degree. I would love to see the outcome if the university tried to fight this.
No, it goes like this:
"Copying any number of pieces of work without providing sources, in other words, copying any number of pieces of work and claiming it's your own, is plaggiarism. Copying any number of pieces of work and correctly providing the sources is research."
)O(
Never underestimate the power of stupidity
Never underestimate the power of stupidity
To err is human, to moo bovine
They also do lots of money out of patent-free informations, they teach them...
....but it said something along the lines of anything created on/with IBM time and resources. Now I'm not an R&D guy, they might have to sign over their brain upon death for all I know.
Vermifax
Vermifax
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I do development across the board from web projects to administration tools, and it all will be or already is available under the GPL. Many of my other projects are worked on during business hours because my job is flexible enough to allow me to do that. At the same time, much of my spare time is spent developing work-related software. It all balances out.
We use Linux and other GPL (and otherwise Free) software here at work, and I feel I and the organization I work for owes it to Free software to give back. I haven't formally asked permission to do this, however I'm reasonably sure my boss wouldn't have any objections.
However, should my employer one day demand I stop releasing my work (technically owned by them) as Free software, I wouldn't argue with them. Instead I would immediately quit in protest, and they'd be much worse off (read screwed).
Jason.
I'll follow up with my own 2 cents worth here.
Back in around 1980 - soon after I graduated from college, California passed a law that stated that any work done without company resources on your own time was yours and no-one elses. My understanding was that the state law invalidated any employment contract that claimed to the contrary. I know this because my then employer sent out a memo explaining things.
SO - if you are doing work for the university, and the university is in CA, then you are covered by this situation. Any work you do on University time or on their equipment is owned by them -simple work for hire situation. Any work you do using your own resources is owned by you exclusively.
Have you compiled your kernel today??
Research performed for, and paid for by, the U.S. Government is supposed to P.D., at least, these
were the rules when I did some contract work years ago. Finding the source can be tricky, but if the
work can be identified, and located, you can request a copy. Some of the work, of course, is
classified, and there are the usual security restrictions on those items.
Some states may impose a similar rule, but California (AFAIK) does not, so research performed
at University of California sites belongs to UC and any company with which they partner.
I mean what I said--it isn't backwards. Say the programmer worked for "Company X". The point is, "Company X" didn't GPL the code. The actual programmer declared the code he wrote to be under GPL, but he never owned the code he wrote, so he didn't have the right to do set the code's license. So another company, "Acme Co.", doesn't even have the right use the code, and certainly doesn't have the right to modify and distribute it under the GPL, since the code was never legally released to be public. The programmer's declaration that the code is under GPL is worthless--the code would have to be put under the GPL by "Company X" for it to be legal.
A programmer doesn't have the right to sell or give away any of his company's code, whether he wrote it or not. And under this kind of contract, everything he wrote, even at home belongs to his company.
Personally, I think you should be responsible to whoever pays your salary. If you're paying your own way through grad school I think it should be your code to do with as you please, and I doubt the University would have any legal rights to say otherwise.
If, however, the University is paying for your education, either directly, or through grants to your advisor, you have some obligation to abide by their rules. After all, that's how it works out here in the "Real World".
G.
University vs. Open Source developer/student is where I think the GPL is going to be tested first.
Here is a suggestion. Take some previously GPL'ed code developed by somebody else or developed in your own free time, such as Readline, or some other useful utility and incorporate the code directly into your project (make sure it's integral and not just linked). Now the GPL legally requires that any derivative source be released GPL'ed. Also, make sure you release it on the web and have some external friends download it (or post to slashdot, freshmeat, etc). Sort of like sending a copy of a paper you've written in a post marked envelop to seal the copyright.
The University may own the copyright, but now the copyright is "copyleft". Now they can't change the license on the code. I'm not clear on whether they could say that no one at all can use the code, but at least they would only have two choices.
The difference is that you're not actually copying someone's code when you use a library or a tool. For instance, you don't (or shouldn't) claim that you wrote the standard ANSI C library that is linked with your software. That is code reuse and as long as the license for the library permits that nobody will bother you.
However, if you decide to take the contents of the ANSI C library, insert them in your code and claim that they're your own (with or without credit), that's plagerism. It can be legal if your license permits that and there are no other restrictions. Similarly, if you integrate someone else's tool into your work, you had better make sure the licenses are okay and that you have given credit where credit is due.
/ \
\ / ASCII ribbon campaign for peace
x
/ \
As a recent graduate from a university here in Australia, I had a few long discussions with one of my lecturer concerning a copyright notice that I put into source code that I had developed on my linux machine at home and brought into the uni to compile on the machine that it was going to be tested on.
He was of the opinion that even code I had written at home was the universities intellectual property (the code was for an automated assignment submission program).
I correctly argued that any work I had done on my personal machine was therefore mine and was subject to any copyright rules that I wished to apply to them. I even talked to a lawyer friend of mine regarding this and he backed up my version of it all.
Thinking back, I think that might be the reason that I only got 50% exactly for the unit *8^(
"Minds are like parachutes: most people use them only as a last resort."
Umnh... do you really mean what that says? It sounds rather backwards. It the company owns the software, then only the company has the right to contribute it to a GPL project. If the code is GPL'd, then it is required that any project that it is to be used in is also GPL unless the author(s) issue the right to use it under another license.
And if you are stealing code, then you are stealing code, whether it was GPL'd or under some other license (of course, it's rather hard to steal BSD'd code).
Caution: Now approaching the (technological) singularity.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
Just a nitpick, but the problem is that it isn't a bogus contract. A bogus contract would just be a threat. This one is a club.
Caution: Now approaching the (technological) singularity.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
Because you are paying them? That's a wierd justification!
Caution: Now approaching the (technological) singularity.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
I think the work-for-hire model doesn't hold for grad students for a couple of reasons (btw, ianal).
First, the primary role of the grad student is as a "customer" of the university. A lot of grad students also work for the university they attend, but that is not their primary capacity. A grad student does not go to grad school in order to work for the university, a grad student goes to grad school to purchase an education in pursuit of a graduate degree.
Second, a university is an academic institution. Work-for-hire is a commercial practice. If we are indeed to keep these distinctions from blurring, then the university needs to forego the work-for-hire argument and concede that it is an academic institution rather than a commercial institution, and an academic institution as well as a commercial institution.
I like to play children's songs in minor keys.
"We're all sons of bitches now." --J. Robert Oppenheimer
Forgive me, I've been up all night watching the election coverage....
That last sentence should read "and an not academic institution as well as a commercial institution."
I like to play children's songs in minor keys.
"We're all sons of bitches now." --J. Robert Oppenheimer
I think this would work the same as it currently does for patented findings ay universities. When a discovery is made by university faculty, the university holds all of the patent rights to it. Research is almost always released publicly, even if it's not patented. The problem arises when you have new biotech companies that are making almost all of their money off of this university funded research, and sometimes patenting it if it wasn't patented already.
My software includes Open Source software, and so is bound to be Open Source.
My University was happy with that, as long as I attached a document to my candidacy proposal explaining the situation and just exactly what it applied to.
No problem! :-)
--
the rule at UC schools is:
the university gets half.
period.
-- Spankmeister General
I believe that Steve Wolfram and Cal Tech had an argument about who owned his code, and then he left Cal Tech.
I spent a summer working at JPL (run by Cal Tech) and I think I recall that they wanted to own all of the code written.
is owned by the university. There was a policy when I was school that said anything developed on a university computer was intellectual property of the university. I don't know but I assume that most colleges have this policy in place. If you develop code on your personal computer you should be safe.
Yeah, I know. I was a little quick with my post, but I think I implied that (or at least I meant to). Mostly I was just correcting the guy who said that "Faculty probably have a lot more control over stuff they create than students, regardless of what field it's in."
-- It only takes 20 minutes for a liberal to become a conservative thanks to our new outpatient surgical procedure!
Wrong. Faculty are employees, and therefore are under contract with the institution. Students, unless they work for the university or have otherwise signed a contract with the university, own their creations by default. (Of course IANAL)
-- It only takes 20 minutes for a liberal to become a conservative thanks to our new outpatient surgical procedure!
If it was done with public money, it belongs in public, not in private. If it was done with private money, then it's up to the people that paid for it.
I am in a similar position to the original poster. I am just about to graduate (6 months from when I was meant to, but anyway), from the Univeristy of Melbourne, Australia. There basic policy, from what I can garner from this statute is that so long as there is no commercial exploitation, i.e., making money from it, of the IP, then the uni doesn't care what you do. If you do make money from it, then either the uni wants a piece of the pie, or, you must get permission from the IP officer of the uni. That is how things such as Mercury can be released under the GPL.
As for the publishing of thesis, they don't want these published commercially because that means the won't be able to include this in there citation statistics to show that they are the "premier research institution in Australia", as shown here. The more research they do, the greater the income for them.
They argue that code written by a school employee (and this usually includes grad students)is a work for hire and that the school should retain ownership and control.
This might be interesting. Here (in IL), it is verboten for grad students to unionize. They consider the teaching (which the vast majority of grad students, like myself, do to be primarily eduactional. Hence we are not "employees" in every sense of the word.
Now, I would like to know, are we suddenly employees when it comes to producing something that they could sell. And, if so, whouldn't we have the right to unionize?
steve
At Acadia University (Nova Scotia, Canada), where I did my undergrad, it was very clear that I retained the copyright on my thesis. Upon completion, I was asked to sign a paper that would give the university library the right to retain one copy of my thesis and loan it out to people who asked for it. (I suppose I could have refused to sign it). I did this, and I could have licensed the software in any way I liked. This is standard practice at Acadia, although I'm not sure if it differs for Grad students (I doubt it). I was on scholarship from the university at the time, which didn't make a difference w.r.t. copyright ownership.
Now that I'm a grad student at a different university, and employed by a big blue subsidiary, the situation is different. Although I am funded, it is through my work, through an industry scholarship, and through a TA position at school. I never signed anything saying that Carleton owns my creative works; if they claim that they do, they'll have to fight it out with my workplace, as they have first claim as far as I can tell.
I have yet to release it, since I have not found the time to be able to do anything with the project, but I think the concept is very sound.
thats bs...what do you think PARC was about, and big think tanks for every major company(Intel, Motorala, AMD). Its all about "think up good stuff so we can make a profit" Motroala emplys 1000 people just to fuck with the technology, so that they can be on the cutting edge(and not get left behind, like they did with PCS to nokia). And none will convince me that when one of the brains comes up with THE killer app, that Motorala wont take all of the pie. Thats the shity part about working for someone.
I knew a guy once who as an undergrad did badly on a project and was to retake the year.
In a huff he sold the project to a local company for a substantial amount of money (about $20,000) brought it to the university's attention (thinking that if someone payed for it his grade could be increased) and was expeled from the university on the grounds that the code was written using university resources.
I took up te question with my own tutor at university and was not given an answer. I do know that in subjects such as Archaeology the university retains copyright and will want a slice.
Programming must be different though because it directly maps to a product. The closest I have ever come to a direct answer was in a presentation when a team member in our group project (2nd year) talked about commercialisation we were told by a senior professor "doesn't the University own this though?"
My own opinion is that the no-one knows the answer and its played by ear.
Does IBM still do this (require employees to assign to IBM the rights to _everything_ they create)? If so, how do they handle GPL'd software? Anybody know?
IP issues are complex, so you and your fellow CS grad-students should get together and retain an intellectual property attorney to advise you. Depending upon their hourly rate, you might even want to have him or her join you at your meeting with the school's IP lawyers.
IANL, but you have some choices:
Work-for-hire should apply if you have a _contract_ that specifies what you will create and how much you will be paid to create it. In a graduate-student situation, this reasonably might be construed to extend to work done in support of teaching duties (coding coursework problems and solutions, exams and answers, etc.), but you might want to get this spelled out in the paperwork defining your graduate student agreement with the school.
Again, any project that incorporates GPL'd code _must_ be licensed GPL, but you can also grant the school a nonexclusive right to publication; they can then aggregate your works with others and charge fees for copies of the aggregated works, as long as they don't remove or restrict the GPL for your work. Their copyright to the aggregate would cover only the entire publication, but not restrict fair use of your individual GPL'd work(s).
OTOH, if you create something that does not include GPL'd code, you can either; (a) slap a GPL license on it (then, see above); (b) copyright it yourself; and/or (c) assign the copyright to the school. Your freedom in these choices will depend upon the terms of your agreement and/or contract with the school. This is why you might want to consult an IP attorney.
If you create or discover anything potentially valuable enough to patent (as opposed to simply copyright), then you _will_ need an IP attorney. But since you can't now know if this might occur, you should get an IP attorney now, before entering into any agreements with the school that could constrain your future rights. Make sense?
Or perhaps code developed for SDI during the '80s?
Oxryly
In all my time writing GPL'd code, I have never once come across any problems with management (besides the initial "what do we benefit from this"). I think that a lot of the intellectual property issues that occur on university campuses deal more with the universities thinking that they are losing money on these ventures, when in reality, the pooled effort is most likely saving them money in the long run.
Besides, most colleges and universities are reaping the benefits of GPL'd products; we have at least one Beowulf cluster running on campus, and there are more Linux/BSD webservers popping up on campus every month, despite heavy Microsoft marketing here.
If it does become an issue, simply talk to your administrators about the benefits they have directly or indirectly received from the use of such software licensing.
---
"He may look like an idiot, and talk like an idiot, but don't let that fool you. He really is an idiot." - Duck Soup
When I started here at Georgia Tech, I was required to sign an agreement with the institute stating that any marketable research I cranked out would become their property, though I am entitled to some sliver of the profit. Somehow I thought they did this everywhere, given how much money you can make off such royalties.
If no such agreement is in place, that really limits their right to claim your work, particularly at an academic institution. I don't think graduate work constitutes "work for hire", or at least it's a gray area.
Uhh... am I the only one that sees a blatent error here? Perhaps I'm wrong, but when I think of the word "Employee," I think of someone who gets paid to go to a certain place and do work... A grad student pays to go to school... and code he writes, he effectively payed to write! Where's the confusion here? Someone who pays to write code for (in the end) their own benefit should, of course own the code. If companies got paid to have code written for them, I would think that would be, if anything, a sale of that code. Quite the opposite of owning that code...
What's their Intellectual Property there ? Thinking about Linux of course... although it's quite clear that developping the Linux kernel was NOT a "work for hire", I'm quite sure that Linus must have used the ressources of the university of Helsinki at some point. Under the policy of many universities as I understand them (like mine for starters) , this should make the Linux kernel intellectual property of the school... let's all hope they're fine with having their code GPL'd!!
/. "Ask Linus" section ? :-)
Of course I'm joking there, but it raises interesting questions, like is there a threshold in the use of the school's ressources above which you have to give them the copyright of your code/work, or do you have to refrain from using any of their ressources to be sure to keep the control of your work ?
I don't know, Linus must have thought this out at some point ; where's
Your customary duties are those you are paid to do, such as grade papers, see students, prepare lecture.
Your student program should not be covered by employment. Thus any efforts expended here should be considered yours, or at least should be for the public good of humankind and must not be restricted!
---
You were a moderator with 5 points. You should have read the moderator guidelines before you did any moderating
>It is their time, if you are a graduate student. Grad students are paid by the university, so you are, in a sense, working for them.
That's still not so simple:
1) If I was paid by a software company for cleaning bathrooms, and while doing that I developed some software, they could hardly claim it. They would have a point if they could prove that I used their ideas or their equipment, but that's it. Most graduate students are paid for teaching, not software development. If you are on a fellowship, then it would all depend on the exact terms of the fellowship.
2) If they don't pay you, it is also not that easy: usually when working on thesis/dissertation, you have an advisor who picks the topic for you and helps you with the work. You also use their resources - computers, network, library. So it is not surprising that they want a share.
3) OK, so what if you pay them? You pay for your advisors help and the facilities. Doesn't that take care of that problem? Aren't you basically paying consultant, rent on equipment and library fees? Try to go and actually hire a consultant, rent a computer etc. Then compare the price with your tuition. Than add the fact that no consultant is going to give you a degree, not to speek about all the other classes you take in college or grad school.
Somebody suggested that if your school wants the code of your dissertation, they should pay you an hourly rate. OK, but are you willing to pay your
advisor an hourly consultation fee?
AccountKiller
> 1)What happens if I release my thesis into the public domain under the GPL before I hand it in to my professor?
... under the terms of the GNU General Public License ..."
As others said, they may refuse to accept you theses, and you may have to write new one.
I would also like to point out that if in fact they do hold a copyright to your work, either sole or sharing it with you, *you have to ask for their consent before you release it under any kind of license*, otherwise your act may be invalid!
Read the actual GPL, in the section "How to Apply These Terms to Your New Programs", it says:
"You should also get your employer (if you work as a programmer) or your school, if any, to sign a "copyright disclaimer" for the program, if necessary." After that there is a sample.
If they insist on keeping the copyright, they can still agree in publishing the program under GPL. For example, any file in the ucblogo source tree (which I just happen to have here) contains the following text:
"Copyright (C) 1993 by the Regents of the University of California. This program is free software; you can redistribute and
I wonder how many of the supposedly GPL published programs out there are not realy GPL published, because their authors forgot to get a consent of their employers/schools, who hold the copyright.
AccountKiller
Your argument is silly... by your logic, you have the right to order cops and judges around...
after all, you pay taxes, so you are their employer.
And the truth is, *you* are not. *We* as taxpaying citizens are their bosses. The _public_ is the boss, not the individual. We are the bosses because we elect the judges, the commissioners, the other officials who then appoint others.
If you want your money to be spent the way you want, start a campaign to be heard, the more people, the more you will be heard.
But even then, your state university won't really listen, because (AFAIK) they have autonomy when it comes to their internal decisions.
well, how else are they going to pay for the interest promised on T-Bills and other stuff?
AFAIK, a lot of funding for big projects comes from selling municipal bonds, and a large part of taxes goes to paying off the interest on those...
But as far as a university selling the work of its grad students and faculty goes, think about it this way:
If your local State University sells the work of its grad students and faculty, and makes some money, that's less taxpayer money that the school uses, and so that's less tax money that needs to be alotted for it next year. Which means less tax money going into that school.
So yes, "profit" is needed by the government, because it reduces deficit spending, which means ultimately lower taxes.
And I'd be willing to bet very few governments actually end the year with a surplus (which the Federal Gov't did last year, I believe), so in the grand scheme of things, there is no profit, just less deficit...
I wonder if this would apply to my Undergraduate Thesis. Anyone know? I doubt it would because I wasn't working for the school. I was just a student.
In author's case, the problem would lie in if he/she is actually working as a professor at the school while working on his/her PhD. If he/she is working for the school, then I would say it belongs to the school because it could be considered work for hire, but if not, then I am not I sure. I would say no. IANAL.
Another question, what happens if you are a professor at one college and you are working on your (Master's or PhD.) at another college? Which school would own the "Intellectual Property"?
I think too many questions could be raised in the case where the person is not working as a professor. I would be interested in here what happens eventually tho.
At the next eco-hypocrisy-meeting, count the private jets used to get to the meeting. Should be interesting to see that
I'm an undergraduate student, and I am getting paid (very little money, but the experience is invaluable!) as a research assistant for a professor in our CS department. The money comes directly to me, and although I could choose to apply it to my tuition, I usually just use it for spending cash.
AFAIK, any code I write will essentially be free (as in speech, if not as in beer) for the public to use. What license or whatever I don't know, but I'm technically working for the government, so it's probably theirs to decide.
***
"...because we are not a corporation in business to make money, we are a research and teaching institution that exists to advance human knowledge . Limiting the spread of software, like limiting our publicaton of research, hinders that goal."
If they want to do hire people to do private research or private coding, they should quit calling themselves a University.
At my school I am required for all code submitted to include a legally binding copyright on the second line of *EVERY* file after the file name. My professor has said that this is required as an attempt to prevent cheating by students who want to copy other people's code, in that you could potentially sue the student that copied your work. I don't think that there has been a case where this has happened as of yet, but it's still a viable deterrent for the people that dont want to do their own work.
http://tf2.digitaljedi.com
Flag: IANAL & from UK.
When you get a paper accepted into a journal, you have to sign a copyright transfer form (if you're the first author; you do this on behalf of ALL the authors). This implies that you have ownership of the copyright, right?
So if they try and argue that they *own* your work, find papers written by lotsa big cheeses in your university / college, then say "well how did these guys transfer copyright to the journal?" - it must have been done since its published in the jounral.
You might be failing to distinguish between
1) the university owning your work
2) The university taking the right to a non-exclusive, perpetual license to your work, with no restrictions on subsequent sale and sub-licensing.
Certainly Cambridge University asserts the second right, and requires you to grant them such a license as a condition of study. They can legitimately claim to be doing this to secure dissemination rights into the public domain, while maintaining the legal ability to persue plagiarisers and unlicensed commercial exploiters. Of course, this also means they can syndicate to subscription services, as I know many US colleges do. Whether you think this is right is another issue.
But - if they are asserting the second right, there's nothing to stop you GPL-ing your work for public use, and forking the code yourself by making enhancements after that date that leaves the uni marooned. But as it stands they can still sell the original to M$FT. Remember though - so can you.
Dave (waiting for thesis viva-man)
I want to point out that the GPL is not the only way to ensure this.
Fsck cluebie moderators. I'll say what I want, offtopic or not. And fsck having to qualify every bloody statement just
Think about the GPL: People can resell it all they want for a modest duplication fee.
All the GPL guarantees is that if the University makes changes, they have to release the "new" thesis (ie the derived work) under the GPL.
-- I ain't broke, but I'm badly bent.
This contract that you are asking me to sign; it, itself, is an instance of intellectual property. Who owns it? You, Mr. Lawyer, can you re-use the words of this contract in other contracts you produce?
Always, the lawyer is asking me to enter into an agreement, to sign away a piece of my mind, that the lawyer himself would not agree to with respect to his own work.
So, how do I get hired?
Well, I recognize that my employer needs to receive value for the money he is paying me, but I won't give up the rights to my own writing. So, I assign the rights to my paid work as a unified piece of writing, in exchange for my pay, but I negotiate an irrevocable license to use components of my writings in other works.
My employers agree to my terms, because they know that when they hire me, they get the benefit of my past body of work, and it is only fair that I add to that body of work while I work for them.
This is pretty much the same deal that lawyers get; the lawyer's customer buys a contract, but the lawyer retains the right to use the paragraphs of that contract in other contracts.
If you were working for a company and happened to come up with some idea unrelated to a project, you still have to present the idea to your company before you can take the idea as your own property.
If you take the idea to your employer (in this case your university), and they refuse to patent it, then get that refusal in writing and then GPL it, or patent it yourself or whatever.
Either that, or hide the idea until you quit, and then GPL it. But IANAL.
Yes, but it does happen in the sciences, after a fashion. I don't know about other big universities, but at the University of California, when you are hired (even on soft, non-university money) to do research (including grad students, assistant researchers, professors) you sign a form that states that the university is a coauthor (full author? I honestly don't remember) on any thing you patent while at the university.
So, I can publish my research all I like, but once I try to patent something and get money for it, the university gets a cut, and possibly control. (Again, I wish I could remember for certain, though in my field the odds of getting a patent on anything I come up with are very, very slim.)
And UC has no trouble getting faculty and grad students.
For questions three and four, I can answer those right now. As you would be the writer of that thesis, you have copyright over that document. The university does have some control over research projects, etc. that go on at the university, but mainly if you can prove you did it on time not on the university's pay it is yours for the keeping.
Ciao
nahtanoj
An easy solution to this is to just start with GPLed code. Start by checking GNU hello_world.c into your development tree and build from there.
That way its GPLed from the start and everything you do is just an addition to it.
Universities wish to maximize their potential profits and gains regardless of wether they are "right" in doing so. Universities have money and lawyers and you're playing their game anyways if your employed by them or if you are a student.
The real cost is people aren't inclined to work when they don't "own" their end results:
I work as an admin at my university ... once I was asked to create a finger print recognition system that would unlock doors / allow access to computers based on thumbprints. I could have done it, would have been alot of work (we have some fingerprint code already). But I refused -- interfacing the finger scanners on all of the machines we run here (Irix, Solaris, NT, 98, ME) would have taken months to figure out, and the 10$ an hour I get paid dosen't buy much hard work. Not to mention that IO Software hasn't even done that -- and thats who we get our finger scanners from (and some grant money). Basically, I would have been intellectual slave labor for IO Software... fuck that :)
Free Techno/Jazz/DNB/MI Music by guys obsessed with monkeys!
It's theirs.
If you want to write stuff you own, just like anybody else in the software industry, youneed to do it on your own time and with your own resouces. Its best NEVER to let the code touch your machines at work and for what youa re doing privately to be different enough hen what youa re doing for yoru employer that they can't claim its derivative.
I know someone in my college who paid off his loans because he got in on the VA Linux IPO - all because he co-wrote some GPL'ed utility program that got in the major distros... And I know he did it on his spare time, in college, and the university was NOT demanding any profits. That's how most college-based contributions arise... not from schoolwork, but from spare time. So while the issue is valid, it's mostly irrelevant. :-)
Here in Cambridge (England), two Comp Sci students wrote a single-threaded WWW server as a final year project. They kept the copyright, and started selling it as a commercial product, under the name Zeus. Not only could this pay off their student loans, it could probably buy half the university
I don't know of any official position, but AFAICS the university doesn't try to assert ownership of student's code. In fact, our in-house mailserver is GPLed and used by many big ISPs (Exim). Who knows - maybe if they'd kept it proprietary and sold it, we could have had that OC-48 already...
Bullshit. I was a grad student for 7 years and never got one cent from the university.
Calm down. I ammend my statment: Most grad students get paid, they don't get paid well but they do get paid.
~LE
ON THE OTHER HAND.... None of this hols true for a school. It's not their time, (you're actually paying to be there in most cases). Also it is with your own equipment..(most of the time).
It is their time, if you are a graduate student. Grad students are paid by the university, so you are, in a sense, working for them.
~LE
It is called being a Graduate Student. You get paid pretty crappy, but you do get paid.
I am a student at a university, I am also a paid employee of the university. I am sure that anything I create on their time, or for a class could be considered university property.
~LE
This is basically what I do to protect code written in my spare time becoming the property of my employers.
Even quite trivial programs benefit from the inclusion if "getline", "OPT", "pcgrep" etc. I find it benefits the finished program greatly to use as much GPLed code as you possibly can.
For more complex programs binding your code "GTK", "plot", or some suitibly useful GPL package also helps imensely.
While this doesn't prevent your employer claiming ownership of the bits of code you actualy wrote, its like trying to claim ownership of the engine + backseats of a car. You could walk of with them but they wouldn't be much use to anyone.
Just to muddy the waters further I also use code fragments and subroutines which were written while I was employed by other comapanies.
Old COBOL programmers never die. They just code in C.
Everything written after hours or during breaks belongs to you and you can GPL it if you want to.
Some people are employed on project basis without fixed working hours. In that case everything what does not fit within your task description is yours to GPL or whatever.
Bear in mind, however, that there are exclusivity clauses which prohibit you working on "similar" projects like the one you are employed for, on task or full-time, basis by your institution.
Watch out with this "similarity" stuff: it cannot be that you can't publish an spreadsheet because you signed a clause which forbids you to work on computer-related stuff other than your main job.
Success,
The Skunk
The nice thing about Windows is: it does not just crash; it displays a nice little dialog box and let's you press 'OK'
If, as a student, you specifically signed up for a project that was not part of your class, and not part of the required curiculum, and it was funded by taxes, a corporation, etc. Then it becomes clear that the univerity owns it, or at the very least are stewards of it. If your code was simply the result of a class project, or even your thesis, I think it belongs to you, but in monetary terms, if it ever turned a profit, I think the univeristy and contributers might have a stake in it. That would be a decision for the courts, or more specifically, the university lawyers. As a taxpayer, I think that in an organization that gets my money, but yet still charges tuition and other fees, I deserve some of the profit... so it should be public domain and GPL'd. On the other hand, if I was a university, I would also want a return on my investment. It works both ways, but then again.... I have always thought that a student should be considered a university's customer, not his or her employer. Just as a cable company is not the employer of a subscriber to a broadband subscriber.
OK, no real facts, just some observations and musings.
My main question is what would this situation be if the university received no grants, but only fees for service. I guess you would need to sign a contract saying you did not own the code you wrote, however I would fight to ensure that the university could not own it. It could be a cooperative ownership... I dunno
I seek not only to follow in the footsteps of the men of old, I seek the things they sought.
Making it GPL is of limited use since people can only use the code in GPL projects. That may well be a good thing in your opinion, but it's not the same as making your code available so that everybody can use it at will.
I believe posters are recognized by their sig. So I made one.
UIUC and Berkeley (with BSD Unix) knew how to change the world. Trying to make a business out of things usually just gets in the way of research and progress.
--Neal
--Neal
Go IETF!
That would mean all software would be "OSI Certified Open Source Software" and the research cannot result in royalty-generating patents.
E.g. many people (especially firms in the open source realm) would like to give money to a university, and guarantee that any Intellectual Property that results is available to all. I.e. all software is open source, and all patents are open ala http://www.openpatents.org/
Has anyone seen any grant RFPs like that?
The US government often requires that they be allowed to use the fruits of research they fund. Their regulations would contain a lot of the appropriate legal boilerplate, I would think:
Federal Acquisition Regulation PART 27--PATENTS, DATA, AND COPYRIGHT: http://www.arnet.gov/far/current/html/27.html#Subp art27.3
Other related stuff:
OpenScience: http://www.openscience.org/
http://www.sourcexchange.com/
--Neal
--Neal
Go IETF!
Yes!
If you say take lines 120-200 from say the Linux kernel and use it in your program, your program must fall under the GPL license or you are in voliation.
But, you can use link against GPL libaries, as long as you don't have any of the main code inside them. Check out LGPL for more info.
"`Ford, you're turning into a penguin. Stop it.'" -THHGTTG
I'm working at Michigan State University, and I get about half payment by wage and half payment in tuition.
I just graduated from the University of Waterloo. They have an extremely liberal policy on intellectual property. Anything you develop on their systems, aside from stuff written specifically for the university (administrative, etc.), you basically own. This includes all research, student work, etc. The only limitation is that the university retains the right to use anything you write for future research, teaching, etc. within the university. Many companies surround the university which were spawned by research done there. They are often owned in large part by the professors themselves. They continue doing their research at the university, except they are (a) a lot richer, (b) supported by their own companies to do more research, and (c) more interesting (usually!) as lecturers. See http://www.adm.uwaterloo.ca/infosec/Policies/73a.h tml
The relevant section of the policy:
Owners of IP rights in scholarly works created in the course of teaching and research activities grant the University a non-exclusive, free, irrevocable license to copy and/or use such works in other teaching and research activities, but excluding licensing and distribution to persons or organizations outside the University community. Any such licensing and/or distribution activity would be authorized only by an additional license from the owner(s).
Gavin
Forgive me if I'm wrong, but doesn't the concept that the University can keep you from publishing your work go directly contrary to the concept of academic freedom? (indeed, one might argue that the entire reason people work at universities is so that they may publish their work, instead of going to work for some corporation with restrictive IP requirements).
:-)
If a university is going to try to profit off of and restrict my work, why the hell would I work at a university instead of a corporation?
Currently an undergrad, but contemplating the future
GPL'd code would be easier with IBM owning it. It would be IBM, rather than a group of programmer who releaded it under the GPL.
I obviously cant speak for all school's, but here's what happens where I am: You write code as a grad student. You are paid in two ways by the school: a) salary (usually a stipend) b) reduced tuition So its really kind of both.
--matt Cowger
There's really four possible scenarios with this work for hire question:
1) You are employed by the university as a programmer writing internal administrative software.
2) You are a grad student writing software directly related to research for your thesis. The difference between this and the last is that you're not paid by the hour for this work, so it is harder to distinguish between work and non-work hours.
3) You are coding for personal projects on university-owned equipment.
4) You are coding for personal projects on your own equipment.
Architecture majors at UIUC don't have any rights to any of the models or projects that they build for classes aven though the University doesnt pay for any of it. I have friends that have spent hundreds of dollars building a single model and they don't gt to keep it! I dont understand how the University can claim ownership of something it had no part in the making of, intellectually or otherwise.
-Well, it may not take a Rocket Scientist to figure this stuff out, but I figure it can't hurt
Since when do employees have to pay their employers to be admitted to their place of work???
Yes.
As part of my Masters in the UK I did a substantial piece of coding to aid telescope design. Do I own that code?
> - grad students are generally paid by the school
In my case, I pay the University to go there
> - the school's equipment is generally used by the student for the work
Mostly it was my own computer - only the final demonstration was done on their equipment since it was a requirement of the project.
> - the work is being produced for the school as a requirement for the degree
True
In my case, I bought the computers, I wrote the code, I paid fees to be there, I even paid my own heating bill and bought my own coffee. Why should the university own my code?
Personally I think that joint ownership, 50/50 with the department should be the agreement since I did use some of their expertise.
Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not sure about the former. (Einstein)
They also wanted to enact this regulation retroactively. Thats right, they wanted intellectual property rights over anything that was created here in the past as well as anything to be created in the future. Thankfully, the student government shot down this regulation, but the fact that the administration even tried this was scary none the less. A regulation like that could have serious ramifications for the student body and alumni. Especially if you consider that one of the founders of Yahoo!, and I forget who (David Filo?), is a former Tulane student.
--------------------------------------
If Murphy's Law can go wrong, it will.
Carlos Niebla
Carlos Niebla
I know that when I was an Undergrad student at Univ. of New Mexico studying Architecture we were specifically told that ALL work producrd by the student for calss or conest projects BELONGED to the university and NOT the student that created it..
Death and poverty like me so much, they've brought friends!
Whilst i was getting my MBA/MIS at a large research university, i worked in the University's Technology Transfer/IP office. We applied and recieved monies from the Federal Government, State Government, and from the tuition fees of regular students. The results of any research that was sponsored or funded by the university in any shape, form, or fashion, or was derived or worked upon by any member of the University's faculty or staff became explicit property of the University. Grad students with research assistantships for tuition, salary, or both count as staff. (those paying their own way were considered staff too if they worked under the direct supervision of a professor. otherwise they were on their own) The reason for this was that since the University (a public institution) received these monies from the public sector, the use of these monies had to stay in the public sector. Now you may not consider the use of these funds by a University a benefit to the public sector, but since the University operates under a State Charter/Land Grant, it is. Many times it was the case that these technologies were re-licensed back to the person who invented them so that they could profit from them (usually first person we asked to lisc. the technology). So it wasnt always as bad as you hear. But we did have min. requirements for any licensed technology to keep in order to retain their license (had to protect ourselves in some fashion).
hope that this sheds some insight on the subject...
Ok replace we and citizens or whatever makes sense. I was using the word "me" well to represent all of us now how about the argument? That and answer the central question since when did the government have a right to make a profit off of our tax money?
Cypherpunks: Civil Liberty Through Complex Mathematics. Those who live by the sword die by the arrow.
true true
Cypherpunks: Civil Liberty Through Complex Mathematics. Those who live by the sword die by the arrow.
If they don't pay you they don't own it. You go to University, pay for lectures, labs, supplies, textbooks, research and a host of other things then you don't own what you produce... if the school wants to keep the work you produce they should either pay for it or reflect your ability in your tuition fees.
flinging poop since 1969
In this case, they wouldn't have any principled objection to your forming a union, in order to bargin for the best possible compensation and working conditions.
Schools ultimately receive their money from the people they serve. Private schools receive most of their funds from tuition and other private funds. I would consider a private school as more of a research and training comany and therefore they would retain the rights to IP much as any other comany would.
State schools are supported by tuition and state taxes. Many graduate students receive state grants or hold state jobs to pay for their tuition. But this money still comes from the taxpayer. If the work is valuable, then the people have a right to benefit from it. I guess the argument can be made that the school is the entity that works on behalf of the taxpayer to make sure that the taxpayer gets compensated for any works that are produced by the school. Money coming into the school from licensing is less money that the taxpayer has to pay.
On the other hand, universities are supposed to serve a higher purpose by enhancing the knowledge of the population in general. Businesses should benefit as well because they also pay their taxes. How can this be accomplished when all this learned information is bottled up and given to only those that pay?
And then there are the rights of the student. What reward do they receive for their labor? Some would argue that the diploma and official recognition is their reward. They are now able to leverage those credentials to secure a better future for themselves. Another viewpoint is that the student developed the idea and should reap all the benefits. I think the state should receive something, in order to recoup expenses and also to help fund other graduate projects. But I don't think that the state should get everything. How about a 50-50 split?
It would appear that the financial considerations are at odds with the philosophical issues and as always the issue boils down to money.
Remember, You are unique...just like everyone else.
Start your project at home on your own time and GPL the code, or find some other GPLed code that you can use. Then when it's time to do work for the University use the GPLed code and the University will be forced to GPL all the code that you generate because it's based of GPLed code.
It was formally attached to the end of my employment agreement. They required me to initial that I had read it. It my experience, they only do this when they are trying to cover their asses. The agreement itself almost seemed to contradict the statute, but it was made very clear that the statute had priority if push came to shove.
As a former grad. student in physics, I never had anybody say my work was the property of the university. Of course, none of my research had any immediate application in industry (maybe in 10 years). I have gladly given my code to anybody who wishes it, along with my thesis (ps/pdf/tex). It would be sad to think that I could not do this, given my feeling that the sharing of information fosters a more robust pure research environment. One other point: could you imagine a scientific publication that gave the results of a long complicated derivation without the derivation? The same holds true for my computational physics model. Sure I outlined the basics steps in Physical Review, but pouring over the code is more like thoroughly checking a derivation, IMO. Keeping the code under lock and key would be a travesty, and it would slow the evolution of scientific research as well. (There has already been 1 grad student to graduate who expanded my theory and used my code, and two more should graduate in the next year. It probably would have taken them another 6 months to graduate if they had to start from scratch.)
Im an undergrad MIS student at fsu. and im working on a sourceforge project with a couple of my professors. they didnt seem to mind the open source thing at all, infact they thought it was a wonderfull idea.
Many of us feel that we should have the right to GPL any code we produce, but the university makes lots of money off of licensing.
Well, it's your code, and you're paying to go to university. I suggest an argument of:
"Ah, so we should pay you to come to your university and write valuable code, so you can sell it and make big profits???"
You wrote it. Very slowly: It. Is. Your. Code.
It they want your code, they can damn well pay you to write it, like a real company.
Michael
...another comment from Michael Tandy.
"Goodness me, how unlike the FBI to abuse the trust of the American public." -- The Onion
I'm in the middle of an A-Level project in England
Everything you do is either the property of the exam bored, or the college.
Not only work either, but some colleges and schools say that anything developed using their systems, is their property. whether it's for a project, or something you hacked together in a lunch break.
You know, if you spend enough time working on writing code, your University may be paying you less than minimum wage (if you're "work for hire"). Count those hours, then send them an overtime bill ;)
Essentially, our existing policy states that if the school requests an employee, faculty, staff, or grad assistant specifically writes a piece of code, literature, work product, etc. the school then owns it.
However, the school recognizes that students, grad assistants, faculty, and staff do a significant amount of personal research, writing, publication, etc. Unless the university has provided "substantial support" the author is the owner. "Substantial support" in this context specifically does not include use of computer equipment, office supplies, office space normally assigned, etc.
That said, there are those in the administration who are realizing that this stuff is worth money, and are trying to change this policy to be more in line with the corporate philosiphy that says "You're employed here, you created it, on your own time or not, we own it."
There are obviously, a number of us who are fighting this, albeit with a certain limited success ( translate - they nod and smile, then go back to writing up thier new policy).
Good Luck, I hope more people will take a stand for what should be thier own intellectual property, and maybe we can reverse this creeping corporatism trend.
The initial question specifically specified that this included graduate work. Now, while in your typical undergrad degree, you can get away with doing next to no work, to do a graduate-level thesis (or even an undergraduate honours thesis most places) requires quite a bit of work, and usually involves research in a new area.
The intellectual property issues of that kind of work have been contentious for quite a while. A number of important intellectual property issues (RSA comes to mind immediately) came out of academia. And the question of whether the intellectual property belongs to its creators or to the University is also tricky. Columbia University has a massive portfolio of patents that it uses for revenue stream - ideas developed by its professors and graduate students.
Ultimately, the question is about the role of universities in our society. Should they increase the common good of knowledge, using government and student funding, or should they be attempting to use the knowledge that they have to fund their research and teaching activities?
ian.Yes Homework is owned by them to. Point stop blank end of discussion.
I attend A Big Ten University, and I know that here any work you do while in a school program is the property of the University AS IT SHOULD BE. These school provide you with a top level education for very cheep COMPAIRED TO ITS REAL COST. I know for a fact here that what students pay here is about 50% of what it costs to educate a student per year. So just wait kids one two maybe 4 years when you will get out and make way more money then that little bit of source you wrote for a class or theseis. Think of it as money you dont have to donate later. :-)
At my school (University of Waterloo, In Canada), As far as I understand it, the University makes no claim on IP of students and profs, including software. There have been dozens of spin-offs from teh school by grads, and profs, some who continue to teach part time.
Contracts assigning ownership over ideas that one comes up with even in one's own personal time over to a company are nothing new -- Waelscherts was under a contract like that when he came up with his valve gear design. To escape having to sign the idea over to the railway he worked for, he had a friend patent the idea in the US for him and then signed the patents over to him when left the railway.
Paul Anderson
"I drank WHAT?!" -- Socrates
--
--
You are a fucking moron.
Unless the college is PAYING you to be there, and you aren't paying, how can any coding be work for HIRE? I'd think that any court (well, unless you get a corrupt shit for brains like Kaplan) would have a hard time deciding in favor of a college owning code, papers, etc, written by a student who is shelling out many thousands of dollars in tuition, books, etc.
Also, professors at many universities spend a lot of time writing books, researching projects, etc, that end up earning them money... Many of them do this instead of teaching students (done by grad assistants in many cases. Why aren't the universities claiming this money as theirs because it's "work for hire"?
Colleges and universities are simply wanting to deny students the right to their own intellectual property. It doesn't matter WHAT purpose it's created for, if you create it, it's yours, it's protected by copyright law. Colleges aren't companies paying you to write/code for them.
In 2000 America, is a non-lawyer truly free?
Are they paying you more than you are paying them?
I don't think that colleges have a leg to stand on in claiming to own intellectual property of students unless it IS a work for hire (IE they provide all facilities, etc, for your work, and pay you a salary for doing the work). If you pay any tuition WHATSOEVER, you are paying "rent" for these facilities.
In 2000 America, is a non-lawyer truly free?
A lot of posts in this thread talked about how students were "customers" of universities. Most (not all) graduate students in computer science that do research are funded by their universities, and, while they don't make a ton of money, usually don't pay tuition and receive a small stipend each month. So they're actually receiving a decent bit of money each year, as if they were really employees. In fact, if you add in the cost of tuition, your average grad student at a private school makes the equivalent of ~30-40k a year. Is that a lot? No. But it's not like we're all paying someone to take our IP, and we're definitely not customers.
It's also important to notice that (despite dire threats to the contrary) the kind of work that schools are trying to "own" is not projects undergrads are writing in their dorm rooms. They're interested in the really lucrative research phd candidates are doing in a lab- research which is for the most part funded by NSF or DARPA under grants that specifically give universities the rights to do as they please with the research. Also remember that the universities aren't owned by anyone and don't issue stock or pay dividends- the money is used to fund either education or more research.
On a final note, we had the IP lawyers in to my research group a few months back- they advised us on a number of situations which researchers often find themselves in that make it impossible to later copyright work. One of those situations is publishing a paper detailing specific features (I can't recall which) of your work. Another is presenting those details in any talk to a group of a particular size or constituency, which happens to include a job talk (very common in CS). So if you're really that concerned, there are probably a number of things you can do that will preclude anyone ever making a dime off your work, and odds are the IP guys will tell you about them when they come to speak.
You are also a student. If you're truly an employee, as the university would like to claim, then they could become required to provide benefit plans, pension plans, and health plans that are consistent. You might want to ask them whether they truly want to classify you as an employee because it would set so many precidents.
It has never been clear to me that graduate students are employees. The fiction in almost all cases is that the tuition is paid by either a government grant or work teaching classes. You're not hired to do the research, as the professors are.
Of course none of this really matters because your true status is a slave. The professor probably wants to make some money off your labor so that's why the professor wants to own your code. Most professors don't give a rats ass if you actually publish something and get a job later. They just want to make the money for themselves now.
The only real negotiating position you have is switching advisors. This professor owns your ass. If your professor wants your code, you have to give it to them or leave. I don't really recommend trying to "educate" them about free software or teach them anything. They believe they own you. They do not have a collegial relationship with you. You're their source of income.
Unfortunately, you've got a tough decision to make. If you want to GPL the code, you'll probably permanently damage your relationship with the advisor. If you don't, well, you'll get along. It's up to you.
What if I work for another company at the same time as studying at the university. Who owns the idea then if it is not related to either?
What type of slavery do we have now. Brain Slavery? Can companies let alone Universities actually own the thoughts of their students and employees? What is the use of a University then? What is capitalism up to this time?
"Fighting terrorists with millitary might is like killing a mosquitor on your Dad's forehead with a rifle."
A Corporation can call that intellectual property since you are working on their time, (you're getting paid for it aren't you). Also you are using the corporations equipment (i.e. computers, and resources). This is why a company can lay claim to software that you produced, on their time, with their $$$$.
ON THE OTHER HAND.... None of this hols true for a school. It's not their time, (you're actually paying to be there in most cases). Also it is with your own equipment..(most of the time).
www.slightlycrewed.com - Because aren't we all?
When you are a uni student you are bound by their intelectual property policy - which usualy states that anything that you produce is theirs [the u's property].
I had to do a final year project for my college for my Bsch in CS. I had to make a chat program for this particular project. However, by the end of the story - all my paper work and code becomes the col's property once it has been binded into a book... BUT how I can claim my own property is simple - based on my work I can make modifications to the code in which I show that the modifications are from my own initiative - so in short I planned earlier for these modifications - and gave them one of them...
Furthermore - I conducted a second but improved study [this is where I show my extra work - but this time without their knowledge and resources]
I know that it's tough but you have to always think in advance - remember - for these work you use their resources... you only pay for the education... They provide the resources out of courtesy...
Always do keep it in your mind - that if you believe that your research paper is better than good and would want to claim it after you "finish" uni - then think of two ways; short and one long - use the long one on the uni's version and the short one after uni - conduct a study based on a study of your own.
Great ideas happen at 4am. Bad career moves happen at 4pm...
What would happen if, say, you were working part-time at a computer company, and working as a Grad Assistant. What would happen if you came up with some really cool app/tech/gizmo that relates to both your degree and your tech-job, and both have we-own-it clauses? Who has the rights?
-PARANOIA is fun. D20 is not fun. The Computer says so.
-The Computer
Even if you get an IP waiver from the school, the state can still sue your ass into submission if they want the idea/patent/code/whatever. Just look at gatorade.
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Moderators: I've got tons of accounts, do your worst.
Yeah, but then, the school probably has more money. So it's moot.
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Moderators: I've got tons of accounts, do your worst.
To be perfectly honest, I just through whatever I can find laying around that looks useful into my projects. If the university wants to try to deal with the likely very confusing maze of IP licenses and whatnots involved, more power to them. It would probably just come down to the fact that the entire mess is illegal under the DMCA. But then, pretty much everything is illegal under the DMCA anyways.
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Moderators: I've got tons of accounts, do your worst.
If any work a grad student produces is considered a work for hire, can this apply to the work produced by ordinary collage students? What is the business nature of the collage industry? I pay to attend collage ($100 a class in fact), so I view the school as a seller of a service (education) and me as the buyer. I attend college so I may learn how to make the very things that they want a piece of. If collage is a service industry, what right do they have to demand of me, their customer (or employer depending on how you look at it.), compensation for the work that I have paid them to help me produce? Now if I were a grad student I would argue that the collage already receives ample restitution for the money they spent to fund my research. The university has many things to gain from student project without owning the body of works that is ultimately produced. They first and foremost get another notch in their belt as far as their reputation goes. Isn't that the point of full scholarships? To draw smarter people to the school so others whom look at the success of the graduates will think that a student whom attends (or attended) that school will end up better off then if they attended another university. Second, as far a reputation goes, if a project turns out particularly well, the collage will gain notoriety for being a leader in that field (Just like people whom decide to attend a university because it has a winning sports team.). This will also draw more students and grant money to the University. Thirdly, the student body and the professors become experienced in the field of study in question. This is better then spending money on training because not only do both the professors and the students learn new things, they do it as part of their job. And lastly the most important and possibly the most forgotten reason to freely fund research is that it contributes to the knowledge of the world as a whole and that always benefits mankind no matter what the information is. And it is vital in these days of increasing commercialism that the free flow of information be guarded ever more closely, so as to encourage future discovery. Collages used to be the vanguard of this ideal, but unfortunately more and more of them are now selling out.
Communication is about content not presentation.
If any work a grad student produces is considered a work for hire, can this apply to the work produced by ordinary collage students? What is the business nature of the collage industry?
I pay to attend collage ($100 a class in fact), so I view the school as a seller of a service (education) and me as the buyer. I attend college so I may learn how to make the very things that they want a piece of.
If collage is a service industry, what right do they have to demand of me, their customer (or employer depending on how you look at it.), compensation for the work that I have paid them to help me produce?
Now if I were a grad student I would argue that the collage already receives ample restitution for the money they spent to fund my research. The university has many things to gain from student project without owning the body of works that is ultimately produced.
They first and foremost get another notch in their belt as far as their reputation goes. Isn't that the point of full scholarships? To draw smarter people to the school so others whom look at the success of the graduates will think that a student whom attends (or attended) that school will end up better off then if they attended another university.
Second, as far a reputation goes, if a project turns out particularly well, the collage will gain notoriety for being a leader in that field (Just like people whom decide to attend a university because it has a winning sports team.). This will also draw more students and grant money to the University.
Thirdly, the student body and the professors become experienced in the field of study in question. This is better then spending money on training because not only do both the professors and the students learn new things, they do it as part of their job.
And lastly the most important and possibly the most forgotten reason to freely fund research is that it contributes to the knowledge of the world as a whole and that always benefits mankind no matter what the information is. And it is vital in these days of increasing commercialism that the free flow of information be guarded ever more closely, so as to encourage future discovery. Collages used to be the vanguard of this ideal, but unfortunately more and more of them are now selling out.
Formatted this time. Sorry.
Communication is about content not presentation.
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i used to be a pimp, til i got shanked by my bitches.
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I used to be a pimp, til i got shanked by my bitches
This is really a symptom of a larger problem with graduate student education. Most graduate students who are funded are given positions as research assistants (at least at schools that don't have financial problems)with a 50% appointment. Technically your appointment requires you to work only 20 hours a week. Try putting in two ten hour days and calling it quits for the week. I have known professors who would dock their gradstudents vacation time for not being in the lab on Saturdays. The University always classifies you in the manner in which best suits their interests. Want benefits because you work over 80 hours a week ? You can't have them because you are a student doing this for your education. Want to make money off of your own code? You can't because you are an employee and it was a work for hire. Corporations may be nasty, greedy, amoral organiations that would sell your mother for a piece of the action, but at least they are honest about it. Universities like to pretend that they are different
Truth: If it's not one thing, it's another
In real life, if some software development is even vaguely related to your job, chances are your employer will claim that it was developed as part of your job, whether you did it at 3pm or 3am. And they probably will have a reasonably good chance of prevailing with that claim.
It is regrettable that universities are following suit (and they are, in my experience), trying to patent and copyright a lot of code and writings students produce while enrolled. But regrettable or not, legally, they probably have the same justification for doing it as any other employer.
You should sort things like this out up-front. If you're going to receive some sort of compensation for the code you write, then the person or institution giving you the compensation is going to be the owner of the code. What they do with it afterwards is their business. When it's code that's been written to pass a certain exam or to gain a grade it's different though IMHO. This is something that should become the property of the student. One thing is for sure, you should put these things on paper before you even sign in to a certain university. That way everybody knows exactly where they stand, and prospective students can even base the decision to choose a certain university based on this...
People replying to my sig annoy me. That's why I change it all the time.
In the case of most state schools and just normal projects the answer is going to be the tax payers and this would of course include you.
Excuse me? When did tax-payers become entitled to profits made by using those taxes? Does this mean tax-payers can also be held liable directly when the government runs a loss?
The school owns the money and can spend it within the agreement of the school with the state. If said agreement does not include a section stating that any products created on that school become property of the state or the public, then they are property of the school, plain and simple.
People replying to my sig annoy me. That's why I change it all the time.
IMHO, They've effectively said that "we own everything you do, say or work on which may be considered to be in competition with anything we do anywhere in the world".... "Within the limits of the law"
In the words of Joe Schmoe: "We'll sue you if we can get away with it!".
People replying to my sig annoy me. That's why I change it all the time.
If I remember correctly much of my work at the university involved using GPL'd software. I don't mean using gcc to compile the code, but sometimes taking source code (in parts or in whole) and embedding it in the software that I was writing. If this is the case, then doesn't my code also become GPL'd? I just re-read the GNU GPL and noticed that the last clause states that the author must write to the original author of the software for permission. What if the author refuses to release the code for commercial purposes? If it is the case that the code becomes GPL'd, is the university obligated to rip out the GPL'd source code before licensing the software? This could pose a problem (legal or moral) for those that want to release the software to make money. Can this argument be used to keep the software in the public domain?
Got that? Every grad student has a mentor/advisor. These advisors help the student with everything from spell checking/proof-reading to contributing/refining ideas for the paper. Your thesis is not entirely YOUR work. Yes, you do MOST of the work, but not all.
The advisor/mentor is almost ALWAYS a university/institution employee. Therefore, the work is not yours. You are entitled to put your name on it, and publish it as is the university/institution and the advisor/mentor.
Don't like it? Don't use your good ideas for your thesis.
Unless the University is paying you specifically to perform a role which directly contributed to (and would thereby benefit from) the IP, the IP cannot be considered Work For Hire [they didn't hire you to do that -- it'd be like considering a newborn as a company asset because the the parents were employed at time of conception/birth]. So, under that line of reasoning (barring entry contracts in which the University leases the sum & total of your mind thus making _everything_ you do "work for hire"), you should be able to protect your work from administrative interlopers by simply putting the first specific drafts of it under a license [any license] before anybody else can. Until the University agrees to the license (and therefore admits they have no claim on the IP), you don't have to give them access to it -- and if the IP is actually worth getting at, they would probably rather play along than let you offer it to another University or Corporation. [The expectation is that you're either valuable to their academic reputation or you're paying them for the educational experience.] That's my $.02 on my $.02!
Yeah, well, what have you done for us lately;-)
If you mod me down, I will become more powerful than you can possibly imagine.
I have only one thing to say and I shall see how long it takes to make it. I may not have much to say because I am not paid to program. But I feel that the code a person creates should be their own no matter who they work for. Now I will also say that if you are taking up work time to work on a program that is for your own personal use then that is a conflict of intrest. You should leave your work at work and your personal programs at home. I do program a little at home and I would be very upset if I programmed for a living and was told that everything that I ever created while working for the company (wether at work or at home) was the property of the companies. Personal programs should be the property of the programmer and the programs used to increase productivity at work could be considered the property of the companies, with rights going to the programmer.
Zy, the Zyster, Its Zymore...
Hi, my dad's rich and has lots of friends and he says that even though I'm less popular than this other smart guy that he can get me into the Electoral College. Can you send me an application?
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Seriously, under a Bush presidency, you can forget about IP rights. Open Source is toast, everything will be patented by the Oil Companies and Pharmaceuticals and we're all going to lose all our privacy rights, since it's not written in the literalist Constitution.
So forget about any IP effects, just kiss your intellectual assets goodbye
--- Will in Seattle - What are you doing to fight the War?
The way it usually works is that if you code it, without using the college's equipment you own it. There is a fair use though. So it would be ok to use your college internet connection to talk to someone about code, or visit newsgroups for help. But it isn't ok if you test the part of your software that uses the network on the campus network. Then they own your software. It really bites, that's why I team up my computers with my friends so I can code stuff and not have my college own it.
The GeekNights podcast is going strong. Listen!
At Georgia Tech, anything you while a student is Georgia Tech Property, unless another company owns the work (Like part time jobs or internships).
One idea that has been floating around tech is that we should get a group of students together and start a Corperation that anyone can use to shelter their personal code away from the Institute.
I have heard of cases where people have written some pretty impessive stuff then have had everything to do with the project seized by the Institute upon graduation.
Anyone heard of schemes that have worked similar to the Corperation idea?
Want to see every step I took to start my company? http://www.rowdylabs.com/blogs/pitchtothegods
How does it go ...
"Copying one piece of work is plagiarism, copying many is research?"
Most universities (by now) have established intellectual property policies. You can see Carnegie Mellon's at http://gollum.mac.cc.cmu.edu/univ_policy/documents /IntellProp.html
To the best of my knowledge all graduate students who are paid have accepted (implicitly or explicity) that they are covered by this policy.
white guy
In the absence of any prior agreement, they probably have the right to take your work away from you - especially since grad students are university employees in a sense. If the movement to unionize grads gets moving, maybe you'd have a better bargaining stance to get a good contract which considers this issue.
It seems to me that if you recieve any compensation from the school in the form or tuition, room and board or a stipend, then you are a defacto employee of the university, so any intellectual property rights are owned by the university - as in the work created is a work for hire. To prevent this ownership, students will need to get the university to waive those rights - which I doubt that the university would agree to.
"Microsoft has made computing accessible to a population who would otherwise not be able to use computers" - B. Kernigha
I am not completely sure how it works, but I know that a group of students at my university wrote some code for a class that turned out to be really good apparently. The school owns it, but the professor gets a small cut of the profit and the students get barely anything, though they do get some. Maybe it is just me, but if anyone should make money off of it I thought it would be those that wrote it. I am pretty sure they get their names associated with it, so that should at least help when they are looking for a job, but they weren't being paid for it to begin with, they are all undergrads, it was just an assignment, I don't see how the school can claim ownership.
Actually, these IP problems are quite broad. David Noble, who wrote the excellent "Digital Diploma Mills" series, reports this sort of institutional theft happening in more areas than just code--often universities appropriate whole (online/non-online) courses from the profs who built them, claiming that they "own the content."
You can take me out of school, but you can't take the school out of me.
I'm not a geek, I'm just a clever script.
Anything we coded for a class was usually trivial and not worth licensing, with the exception of classes where we were actually doing something that the professor had a grant for. Even then, because it was a class assignment, it became the property of the professor/college/grantor.
In the physics department at my school, some of the undergrads and grads were paid (sometimes) to work on projects of the staff, but anything produced was likewise owned by the university.
As for thesis and dissertations, I really don't know... I was asked to leave before I finished my Masters. I believe that they were property of both the university and student, in that they couldn't be published without the approval of both, but I really don't know.
Eric Gearman
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Atomic batteries to power! Turbines to speed!
Just because a student is getting paid makes no difference. If it's related to the thesis project or the mentor's grant funded research then the rights belong to the University. If it's related to a private contract, than there's usually some sort of joint ownership between the sponser, the university and the mentor and/or student. But if you get the key idea at 4AM out of a sound sleep at home and have the presence of mind to jot down a couple of notes, you can sometimes argue the point. At least this is what we learned as grad students in the biomedical sciences.
This kind of backhand implicit ownership of students work is very bad, and just outright wrong. I'm not sure how it works at all universities, but I agree with what a previous poster alluded to: if the rights to your work is to be assigned over to the university, you should be aware of that and having to sign a contract is a step towards ensuring that. I also dislike the comparison of a University's legal status as an "employer" with regards to graduate students. Universities ought to be in the business of promoting learning, education, exploration of new ideas etc. Not cohorting students into producing research that can be applied to making a shrink-wrapped royalty friendly revenue generating product. Certainly it's a nice option, but for it to be a /requirement/ is going too far.
I don't think the current state of intellectual property laws that many Universities have going for them are consistant with what a Universities mission ought to be. They need to find other ways of generating revenue that do not deprive individuals of their freedoms, rights, and privacies.
Hopefully stuff like this will force Universities into making a choice: They must choose to either be a place for learning, or they choose to be a place for business.
No there's not! Good point! I think it's very relevent to this discussion, too!
As a sculpture and tech theatre major..no way. Even though the university could provide my materials for an art project ( I only wish), after I am graded on a project it is mine, and I usually sell it..sometimes to the university. As a theatre designer, I may be paid by the university to design, but i retain the rights to those designs. while i can use them again, the university cannot without paying me. as a general courtesy i've never heard of any designer asking for royalites on photos take of say, a scene design, that might be reproduced in university promotional materials. though just for good measure, i'm going to GPL some colours, shpaes, lines and textures tomorrow morning, that way any other artist can incoporate them into their works. ;)
Does that mean that homework is considered intellectual propery owned by the university? So you can share homework with others in the school, since it's all owned by the same university, but you can't share it with other schools. Let's say I'm studying for a test or contest. As my personal studying method, I end up writing a pretty cool app, that I think others would find useful. The university didn't ask me to create it, but I did it while admitted to the school. Is that app owned by the university?
Developers: We can use your help.
I work at a pretty good college, and every student has to submit a copy of their thesis to one of the libraries here. So, from what I know, I think anyone could come in and read a past students thesis and copy pretty much anything out of it. And a lot of the code that is written here is done for a class, and by small groups of people. I think it should be under GPL, not for sale. I'f I'm wrong, please correct me.
However, we have to consider that schools are nourturing students and providing an environment where this kind of development can take place. Most of us have chosen to become students, and in that decision we have to consider that everything that has been developed through the learning experience should belong to school. We would not have otherwise been able to make these developments without them.
If the development of this research, product, etc. is not the direct result of the education recieved, then you should not be doing that kind of development and research at a school. You should be doing it on a private level, thereby completely separating you from any controversy.
As it stands right now, part of the price of school is the forfiture of certain intellectual property, so that scholastic environments can help you develop your intellect to a different level. Your rewards come after graduation and in the future application of everything that you have learned.
I actually ran into this problem before dropping out of my wonderous University. I figured there would be too many hassles so I just started a company and released the prodcut before I got to deep into it's development at the University.
All you really need to do is look at the bi-laws of the university. If there is nothing stated there then the University can really lay no claim to anything you have created...unless it was created for the university. THen you need permission, which can be a real bottleneck and hard to get. That is why I left, modified the product and then could release it.
Good luck.
Im not against a University making money. I am, however, against the idea of a University making a decision based on money rather then what is best for education.
Although be it necessary to license the technology it should be done with the intention of protecting the code from profiteers and to insure the code is kept open to share with others, anything else would be wrong.
Finally my bar skills can be put to use! 1. First check your grad school contract/agreement to see if there is explicit work-for-hire language. Otherwise you can argue whatever you did is not a work for hire (and considering what they pay grad students these days, I wouldn't consider it hire - but maybe slavery - See 14th amendment). 2. Next ask them what happens if you never signed a contract. In other words, does your work automatically fall under the purview of your advisor who I know has signed a work-for-hire agreement if the Univeristy is smart. 3. If you have signed an agreement argue that it wasn't negotiable and is therefore invalid. See Restatement (Second) of Contracts if you are really interested in that argument. 4. Finally, one can always argue free speech. It goes further in the University setting than in the real world. Good luck.
It all depends on teh contract and your advisores contract. Money is irrelevant.
It all depends on the contract you signed and your advisors contract. Source of money is irrelevant.
(1) If you release it w/o the Univ.'s permission be prepared to pay the price. (2) Pay is irrelevant; check your contract/agreement that you signed when you started; a good attorney would argue that pay is not the relevant consideration but the degree and education is instead. (3) You can probably speak about your thesis, you just can't make copies and give away w/o permission of the University. (4) It should be illegal to think, period. Especially in grad. school. Good luck.
IANAL but I'm think that the university should be considered as working for me. I mean I pay the fools $20k a year to attend - a.k.a. I hire them to give me and education with the end goal of reciving a degree. So anything done as coursework should remain in my control. Now where it gets intersting is if someone produces a work while at work on a university job and is also a current student. Mostly likely this would be considered university property (as a work for hire); but one could at least attempt to make the argument the that the university is your employee as so you reatin all rights. I would say this becaue most university student jobs are do not pay well compaired to other jobs; and the reason they can get away ith this is because most students are learning on the job. - a.k.a. the university is preforming the job for which you hired them.
During the past two years, I have negotiated with my alma matter (MIT) over intellectual property rights. One of the issues was the right to the source code that I wrote as a part of my thesis. I had already put the source code in the public domain, so the need for a software license turned out to be a moot point. Below is a summary of what I learned about student IP rights during this process:
1) If you pay tutition the university is only entitled to shop rights. If you use someone's facility to create an invention, you own the invention but the person who owns the facilty is entitled to practice the invention, but they do not own it, and they cannot sublicense it.
2) If your tution money is adminstered by the university things get very grey. Some universities claim that since they are "paying you" they own all the rights. I have obtained legal advice from mulitple sources that assure me such claims would not stand up in court for several reasons:
i) Contractual. In my case, and that of many students at MIT, there was no intellectual property agreement signed upon adminssion. However, the Technology licensing office asked me to sign one when I went in aa spoke to them. This is considered a contract without compensation (one side is giving up something, and the other is not) and is not a valid contract. In fact it is illegal for an employer to attempt to do this, without offering additional compensation to the employee. If your school asks you to sign one of these (except at adminssion as a condition for attending the univesity), you should refuse, you are under no legal obligatin to sign it.
ii) There is a legal notion of a reasonable wage, and if you are not paid a reasonable wage they employer cannot attach intellectual propoerty claims. Grad student stipends are not even close to being a reasonable wage for a person with a B.S.and M.S. degrees in engineering.
iii) The bottom line is the school is being paid for you to be there, they may administer the money, but the money comes from some other comapny, non-profit or government agency. If it comes from the government, the IP rights are governed by the Bayh-Dole Act. This has many ramifications, which are beyond the scope of this post, but you should be aware that the high level goal of the Act was to to insure the public benefits from government sponsored research. While the conventional thinking here is that the way to do this is through commercialization, I think FSF and the Linux community provide a compelling argument for open source, public domain software being of tremendous benefit to the public.
Even though I started a company based on my thesis work, I decided to put the software in the public domain, becasue I felt it would benefit the research community as I had benefited from so much other code. In addition, I filed a patent on the hardware architecture, because I thought I needed protection to start a company. In retrospect, it wasn't necessary and I wish I hadn't done it (but that's another story).
I have spoken to many people at different universities, who are all in a similar situation. Basically univesities have felt left out of the dot-com explosion, and want to get a piece of the financial pie, so they are aggressively going after IP. The risk they run is poisoning the open university atmoshpere which is critical to the generation of such ideas, and in the process alienating future alumni, who may feel less inclined to donate in the future.
Okay, onto life:
I've been pondering this for a while: Who gets to keep the code and the ideas? I'm more business-centric since that's where I've been for the last 5 years, and I'd be curious how people see this relating to the school-slave positions (TA, grad, tech, or otherwise). Basically, though, I'm saying that whenever we work for someone else (as consultant or otherwise), there are some HUGE assumptions people make about requirements and behaviour just because that's how everyone is doing it. So unless you're very, very lucky and were able to negotiate out of some assumptions when you started, you're still a Coding Slave.
What I'm proposing now is that we develop a new contract, perhaps a Coder's Union Contract, that does things a tad differently. There should be 2 basic versions:
1) The company pays the Coder for his/her time. Hopefully this results in a finished project/subproject, but whatever code is produced (during the paid for time) was licensed to the company from the Coder with as many rights as current law gives any licensing of software (ie. include those disclaimers and the company can never complain). The Coder keeps all rights to the code and ideas produced during that time. Perhaps it should even get a "digital watermark" so you always know whose code you've just come across.
Variations on this include being able to use it for a certain time before paying fees, optional service contracts for upkeep, and even having the code licensing being a separate contract from the "pay for time" contract. It should probably also include non-disclosure agreements with the companies so that no one the Coder speaks to about their ideas can ultimately use said ideas without the Coder's permission.
2) The Company pays the Coder for their results. Anything created in the interim including analysis, diagrams, design, testing procedures, pitched code and any ideas used are all off limits to the Company.
Variation: millions, including what's currently ASSuMEd to be the "correct" way to do business - the Company keeps everything and the Coder has no rights. Not even, it seems, to code that can be shown to others as proof of the Coder's proficiency.
Discuss amongst yourselves.
As for the Artist's hypothecal posed earlier, imagine the situation when an artist does a piece of commissioned work: the ideas that the artist used for the piece are the artists property even if some of them get expressed through the artwork. Sometimes the commissioning isn't for the painting itself but for a copy of the art: a slide or electronic copy of the piece, and sometimes it's just so it can be shown for a few months at a specific location. There are all variations in the commercial world. However I do agree that from within School artwork is the artist's to do with as they please!
Many here have argued that if you are getting paid, the university has a right to your code.
However, universities are not for-profit businesses. They are non-profit and have a special place in society. They have a higher mission and consequently get special benefits (no taxes).
As part of a university's mission to benefit society, they hire faculty and encourage them to benefit society. One way they do this is by letting faculty write books and sell them, keeping the profit. This arrangement has existed far longer than computers. It encourages people to write books, which benefits society. Note, the professor keeps the copyright, despite being paid by the university.
Now, software, like books, come under copyright. Why are programs treated differently by universities, then? Isn't it good for society for the university to encourage faculty and graduate students to write programs that will benefit us all?
Obviously, the university is doing this out of greed. This is not appropriate for a university, which is supposed to serve society, not make money.
Here's a particularly difficult case: electronic coursework. Suppose a professor and grad student develop an interactive digital textbook + problem sets. This is rather like a book. Do the authors own the copyright or does the university? If the professor moves to another university, can he/she take the program and use it to teach there? This very issue is being fought out, today, at universities around the world.
One more thing: a CS grad student who is getting $12,000 a year is indeed getting paid, but it is a slave salary. It would be easy for the student to get 5-10 times as much in industry. So the grad student is actually doing the university a favor.
Well, as a student programmer working at the University of Florida, I can tell you that the money here comes from the State. Where they get their money, who knows? Just kidding. But my paycheck is definitely from the state government, not the University's private funds or anything. (You can tell when you have to sign a statement saying that you "swear (or affirm) ... to uphold the state constitution" when you get a job as a programmer.)
I'm not doing any major (scientific) projects though, mostly internal applications that are used for administration and such. Perl, MySQL, etc. I've thought about what license our code falls under, but I think it's pretty clear that such decisions are out of our hands, and we're working on a work-for-hire basis. Since the stuff I'm doing isn't that groundbreaking, that doesn't bother me. The workplace is simply better off for having these things coded, and the question of "who owns them" doesn't really come up. Sure, I could wipe out every extant copy except for tape backup and quit, and people would become very upset, but just because I have power over the code's usage doesn't mean I have authority to do so.
I appear to be rambling. Well, there you have it.
The University of Connecticut owns any invention conceived by its employees in the performance of customary or assigned duties involving the use of University facilities, staff, or any other University resources.
Employees are required to disclose any and all inventions to the University of Connecticut Research Foundation, which is responsible under the State statues for the disposition of patent rights. Under these statues, a minimum of 20% of the amount of net proceeds from the sale, licensing, or other disposition is to be shared with the inventor. At present, the inventor's share is 33.3% of net proceeds."
Also, just as an example, you might want to read through the UConn's Policies & Procedures Governing Sponsored Projects, which covers things like copyrights on music, art, and software. That's all under the "Technology Transfer" secion.
That's confusing. It's bad to reinvent he wheel they say. It wastes time they say. It reduces the chance for error. Reuse code. Use libraries. Use tools. But if you recycle words into your thesis, you're drummed out on your ass. Then when you get to the private sector, resuing code gets your company sued and you fired for "IP theft".
"My opinions are my own, and I've got *lots* of them!"
"My opinions are my own, and I've got *lots* of them!"
"My opinions are my own, and I've got *lots* of them!"
--
Yes, but there are some clauses in the contract which are vague.
IMHO, They've effectively said that "we own everything you do, say or work on which may be considered to be in competition with anything we do anywhere in the world".... "Within the limits of the law"
I'm pretty sure the laws would frown on a tech support person being sued by IBM for independantly developing Linux code. Especially if IBM did not pay for equipment, training, or anything even slightly related to what the person was doing in their own spare time.
It is a spooky document though. I know of a few people who refused to sign it, and nothing has appeared to come of it. If you're getting hired by IBM, try asking "Is signing this paper a condition of my employment?" and get an authoritative answer.
On a similar note, you can get your manager to contact the legal dept to find out if you can work on X, Y or Z, without the company chasing after you. And the contract also has some stipulations about charity which makes it far less restrictive if you aren't trying to profit from it.
An IBM lawyer would be the person to ask though. Maybe they could post an anonymous reply... so long as the proxy server isn't watching :-)
Do grad students agree as part of their contract with the school that their code becomes the school's property? Then yes, it is the school's property.
If you want to retain ownership of your code, make that a condition of your study there. Just say, "I'll do my grad work here, and pay out the nose for it, but *I* get to keep my code etc".
...
Which brings up another point: graduate students are *customers* of the school, not *employees*. Policies that apply to faculty etc should not have anything to do with students (who are not also employees).
MoNsTeR
I forgot to disclaim that I do not nominally believe in the legitimacy of intellectual property. And not just software patents and stuff, I mean ALL IP, ALL copyright, ALL patents, ALL trademarks. Ideas can't be owned, simple as that.
Having just received a PhD from Columbia in NYC, I can tell everyone that your dissertation (for MS or PhD) is owned only by you. By 'dissertation', I mean the writeup of your research results. Copyright is held by you.
I was paid off a DARPA as well as NSF and IBM grants. The university tried to get students on grant money to sign invention assignment agreements; I refused. Nonetheless, I believe the university does have an entitlement to some portion of the research I did. These kinds of laws vary state-by-state. For instance, in California, it is illegal for companies to claim ownership on work you do on your own time using your own equipment.
This is actually one of the reasons that GPL'ed code is so scary to some companies. Lots of companies (not only IBM) ask their employees to sign similar contracts which state that the company owns all the code you do at work and at home. So if you want to use GPL'ed code in your product, you have to know that the code wasn't written by a programmer who has signed such a contract--because if it was, he never had the right to GPL the code, and you (and your employer by extension) has therefore stolen code from another company. Which means that the programmer's company has now contributed towards your product, and you don't have the right to GPL your product either. You might also have to worry about the original company seeking damages from you for spilling thier code to the world. It becomes a really sticky situation. The GPL is great, but if you want to use GPL'ed code for any serious purpose, you've got to trust the source.
As an aside, I'm a co-op student at an IBM company, and I'm under one of these contracts. I certainly can't speak for IBM policy or anything like that, but all I have to do to work on an outside project is ask for permission to have it excluded from the contract--it's reasonably easy to do.
Doesn't the purpose of your job have something to do with this?
The grad students I knew were not paid by the university to write their thesis work, they were paid because of the other work done as part of being a grad student: lecturing, tutoring, grading papers, etc.
If, on the other hand, a grad student is employed by the network administrators, and writes a backup utility, then the University might have dibs on it. On the gripping hand, if [s]he was researching efficent protocols to backup systems over a network, then maybe not.
At any rate, it's all being driven by money. Universities want to cash in.
Fortunately for Computer Science, a lot of the most interesting work (to me anyway) is moving onto the Internet. People like me get interested in particular areas, and just start working together. I don't have a thesis advisor, nor do I take classes. I read about stuff, and start thinking about it. I don't need to go to school anymore. Most of the stuff I need to learn is on the Internet anyway.
As I understand it, grad students may technically be employees, but they are usually (always?) woefully underpaid. If your university is going to claim your software as a work-for-hire, then you should get fair market value for the work you putting into writing it. In other words, if they're not paying you what the market would demand, then you can argue that they're not actually hiring that work -- you're doing it, gratis, to support your research/teaching/studies.
--Jim
--
Americans are bred for stupidity.
Tell them that they're welcome to be treated like a business, the day they start acting like one.
Stop accepting taxpayer money; either make a profit, or go out of business.
Then they can take the things they produce on my dime and start requiring me to pay again if I want to use them.
They accept taxpayer money, they work for the taxpayers; if they produce something, it was a work for hire belonging to the taxpayers.
Not the University, not the Government; the taxpayers themselves.
-
If the stuff is so valuable that it is worth
fighting over, then start a company and move on.
I've seen hundereds of students do this.
Its fairly easy to get startup resources in
today's tech environment. Any previously written
stuff at the university is probably have to morph considerably to achieve commercial standards.
The university I work for at let the author collect one-third of the revenues, with another third going to the department and a third to the university. This was onerous to drive most good ideas out of the university environment. I'd suggest a better division would be at least 50% for the author and the remainder for the others.
Another idea is to start a company, but allow the university to by 10% for a year's salary of the employee.
Ironically Stanford University showed little interest in the student and staff projects that eventually became Sun MicroSystems, CISCO and Yahoo when offered a cut.
If Linus' school had these policies where would Linux be today? Probably on a floppy (version 0.1) in a forgotten storage room at Helsinki U.
How much of the free software we use daily was written by students and academics?
A reasonable argument. "Trespass on public property" has always sounded to me like a very strange crime. But it's on the books.
Practically speaking, one cannot place something that the university considers as belonging to itself into public domain. But one can place it under the GPL merely by building it from a GPL'd code base. Then, even though the university does end up owning it, the code is GPL'd unless the university contacts the original authors of the components and gets waivers from them (i.e., alternate licenses). Of course, they could refuse to accept the project, but that's unlikely, as the professor usually doesn't have close ties with the business office, and even the business office doesn't usually care (at least not until a few years later). The question might then become "do you have a legitimately obtained copy of the binary code?" It seems like the answer would have to be yes, if you are indeed the actual author. But laws are written by legislators and interpreted by courts. Sense doesn't necessarily have much to do with how things get interpreted. So you may not have any rights to it. But the code, were it to be released, would still need to be released under GPL.
Caution: Now approaching the (technological) singularity.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
If you do, or plan to, release your work under the GPL, please get permission before you do. We don't need the problems that a questionable code base could cause.
The more significate your contribution, the more important this is.
Caution: Now approaching the (technological) singularity.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
They can resell it, but if it's GPL'd, so can you.
The best suggestion so far is to include within the body of your work items that have been previously GPL'd by someone else. That way it MUST be GPL'd, and it doesn't matter too much who got the copyright of the new derivative work.
Of course, they could still refuse to accept it, and this doesn't do anything for patents, but it's a start.
Caution: Now approaching the (technological) singularity.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
What happens if I release my thesis into the public domain under the GPL before I hand it in to my professor?
:)
While IANAL, having read many nice books on the topic, including If it is determined by a court that your thesis is a work for hire, then any licenses you distributed it under would be held null and void, because you were not the copyright holder. Remember, GPL depends on copyright law to work. If you don't have copyright, you can't GPL it. (And if it is a work for hire, then you don't have copyright.) Sorry, dem's da breaks.
If my thesis is considered the University's work for hire, what will be the penalties imposed on me for speaking about my thesis in public? Is there a grace period during which I can legally speak about my thesis?
Oh, you can *certainly* speak *about* your thesis. Ideas are not copyrightable, on the exact expression of them. Just like I can speak about a book that you wrote (as long as I don't claim to have written it), you could speak about a thesis that you wrote for the University. I'm not sure if you can claim you wrote it, though. But again, IANAL.
After I hand in my thesis, is it legal for me to think about my thesis, or must I stop thinking about it until I have legally purchased a copy?
Was this intended to be a joke?
My journal has hot
> Baffle em with BS and maybe they will se the light.
You might not even have to do that. Some university CS departments allow/encourage their grad students to release code under the GPL as a matter of course. If you built a list of such schools and presented it at the meeting, perhaps your department would "see the light" without the application of bs.
If you go to various universities' CS departments' research pages, you'll find that in many cases you can download papers and the code that supports the model or experiment that the paper reports on.
You should try to get that built into your school's official policy. Most schools have a mandate to educate the public, and much grad research is funded by the NSF anyway.
Ask where we would be if mathematicians had been patenting their work for the last 400 years. Science is built on sharing.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
My employer has absolutely no claim to what I do on my own time, ESPECIALLY if it has nothign to do with my work.
Now, many employment contracts DO state that employers DO own your thoughts.. but that's between you and your employer. If it's not in writing, they don't own it.
1. Is there state/federal legistlation that states that college/university "students" are considered employees of the college?
2. Does the college require the student to sign a contract that states that the student is considered an employee?
3. Assuming:
- the purpose of a university is to purchase an education,
- the university will require proof that the student is receiving the education being purchased
4. Drawing off of questions 1 and 2, does intellectual property I create while on school premises or school property belong to the school? I believe that the premises and the property fall under more of a lease from the school.
I'm sure I could think of some more, but I really need to have these answers first before I spin my wheels.
--------
"It is one thing to show a man he is in error, and another
"It is one thing to show a man he is in error, and another to put him in possession of the truth." --John Locke
Here's the simple answer:
If it's graduate work, then it belongs to the university. If you have to do it for school, it belongs to the school, unless you claim a prior copyright... but for work done specifically for an academic career, it should belong to the school. Otherwise, I think schools would be more inclined to hire grad students as employees rather than give them a graduate program to follow...
BTW many colleges (and jobs) come up with the funding for graduate students' educations, hence anything the graduate student does on the companies' time should belong to them, not the student. It's only fair that way.
Again, if you have an idea THAT GOOD, don't submit it as a project. Save it for another time, or quit school/work entirely. Invariably, someone else will take all the meaningful credit and/or the money for the idea.
I think the difference is not between art and coding, but between student and faculty. Faculty probably have a lot more control over stuff they create than students, regardless of what field it's in.
It's 10 PM. Do you know if you're un-American?
I'm always *so* encouraged that after paying huge amounts of money and (usually) racking up large student loans, the work that a student does for a class or his/her thesis becomes the property of the school...
P.T. Barnum would be proud of the fraud that schools and their lawyers are getting away with.
I'm glad I don't have to go to college these days...
I print, therefore I am.
I offered to do some grading for my university (University of California, Santa Cruz) at an astronimically low rate, just out of public duty.
But then they wanted me to sign over any patents or copyrights I might gain while employed by the University. Now, given the position this was for, this is flat-out ridiculous. I refused to sign.
I haven't noticed anyone bring this up yet: If you are doing a work-for-hire, can you legally use GPL source code? The GPL being a viral license may prevent that, particularly if the new work will be published. The work of any sort of serious thesis (Masters or PhD) is usually published.
Helping with organizational effectiveness is our job.
My opinion is that you should fight it tooth and nail. The "work for hire" doctrine is intended for situations where an employer gives you specific direction: "I want you to build an airplane that goes 550 knots or better and carries between 400 and 500 passengers." It isn't intended to apply to situations where they say "Go and think of cool things, but if you come up with anything commercially viable, I want a cut because I was buying your pizza."
> They argue that code written by a school employee (and this usually includes grad students) is a work for hire and that the school should retain ownership and control.
Did you specifically waive the rights for ownership of the code you write, while hired?
In the "real" world, the company owns the right for any code that you write BECAUSE you gave them your permission to. (The fact that you are on company time, using their computers is irrelevant.)
i.e.
While I was an undergrad, even though we used the "universitie's computers", any code we wrote was ours, because we never signed anything that said otherwise. (Copyright is automatically applied to the author when no previous agreements are in force.)
To get to the bottom of the issue, you want the lawyers to specifically find where the "ownership clause" is currently mentioned in ALL contracts that employees sign, to sort the mess out.. (You had to sign SOME legal documents before you could work either as employee or contractor, right?!) so check that fine print!
In the future, you school should explicity have a clause added, stating, who owns what,to prevent future mis-understandings (and frivoulous lawsuits.) Typically, a business will say something along the lines of "anything invented on company time becomes property of the company" which is reasonable and standard practice. (I have even heard of some idiots trying to claim all previous inventions of yours as their own when you sign!)
Summary: Read the fine print, Know your rights, and Understand what you are signing your name too !
Cheers
I urge anyone interested in these issues to read this article.
"Mit der Dummheit kaempfen Goetter selbst vergebens." - Schiller
1. did you do the work for a course or expecting course credit or course recognition for this?
2. did you do the work using the school's resources such as network and computing power?
3. are you a college employee where your IP is considered part of your work?
there's probably more...
In many film depts. for example, the university explicitly owns copyright on work created. My undergrad college sold a video piece I had worked on (and which I and my collaborators had contributed our own money toward making, and received no compensation for other than course credit). So I was very cautious when I selected my graduate school to make sure the students/faculty owned their own work at the school I chose.
I am now faculty at my former graduate school (an art school with a film dept.), and although students/faculty still own our own work, ambiguous issues still come up constantly. For example, software vendors sometimes require that they can use student images to promote their product in exchange for giving the school a software donation. Does that mean that any specific student would be required to allow his/her images to be used by a software vendor against his/her will or without his/her knowledge, or only that the school will dig up *somebody* whose images can be used. On the other hand, the school has its own preferences regarding which students' work will be given to the vendor, since the images used promotionally will be representing the school in addition to the vendor.
So it is definitely a slippery issue, even in the arts.
For that matter, what if you wrote code that really sucked? Or a virus? If they want to lay claim to everything else you write, they'd sorta have to take that too.
This is an interesting problem and I'm curious to hear how it turns out.
"This message is composed of 100% recycled electrons."
So let me get this straight, when I do research for a university, I am a employee, thus work-for-hire applies... but if I play sports, I'm not an employee, thus cannot collect workman's compensation when being injured? That is bull.
Probably the easiest way to do it would be to assign (partial) rights to counter-sue to the company that's being sued for using the code.
IANAL. My sister is, but she doesn't talk to me.
`ø,,ø`ø,,ø!
Free Software: Like love, it grows best when given away.
Sure it's legit. Think about it. Your the boss at some new company, and a coder working for you comes up with some whiz-bang new idea while working for you. You start dumping huge cash into advertising, money signs in your eyes. Now, the coder quits and decides to do this on his own. Were it that he owned the code and not you (because he did this for work and on company time) he could sue your ass for loyalties. But, since you own it, the shoe is on the other foot.
Now, I know this is a different situation.. kinda. You work for them. My Sister-in-law is a Masters student in Biotech. and the university is paying her. They may be a (partially) publicly funded school, but they still do make money from what you do. In all fairness, you should be getting a good bonus if they are making all kindsa cashish. But, that would require morals.
tinfoilmedia
I think it comes down to whether the University sees itself as an institution of knowledge and learning or as a profit-making enterprise.
Absent an employment relationship, that's the situation.
In the early 1980s, my Master's project at Stanford was sold by Autodesk as a commercial product, which worked out very well. There was some grumbling from Stanford when I turned in the code listing with "ILLEGAL COPY IF NOT IN RED" stamped in huge red letters on every page. But all they did was bitch; eventually they gave me a degree. Eventually, I made a big donation to the university, so in the end, everybody was happy.
I had the advantage, though, that I was never an employee of the university. I was going part time while working elsewhere. This is an option worth considering in CS, where you can make better money working for a real company.
I have similar problems myself, but another question comes to mind: while I haven't done it yet, I could see myself using GPL'ed code in my own projects. Doesn't that *require* that my code be GPL'ed as well?
Correct me if I am wrong, but a college is a educational organization, right? They are in the bussiness of educating the people that pay a good (dam good) price to attend. These people pay out of ass for a decent education, they pay alot, so that they may learn alot in a short period of time.
GPL software would help colleges, atleast the CS students attending these colleges better educate themselves about their subject of interest.
College are not, or atleast should not be, in the bussiness of the "bottom line" mentality of the corperate world.
People pay really HIGH PRICES to attended college, they are their to learn. They are not their to make the college money. If the college is lacking on money they should raise the fee's required to attend the college.
CS students are their to learn like everyone else, their is no need for the colleges to exploit them, stress them and jade them before they even get into the real world.
If you right a book as an ungrad, is that the school's right to market that book? If you write a term paper, does the school have the right to sell that to the local newspaper for cash?
Just because you can make huge amounts of money exploiting geeks, doesn't mean that you always should.
If the colleges are having troubles paying their billings, they should raise tution. If the colleges are fine money wise their is no reason for them to be so greedy. They are in the bussiness of teaching, not making money.
As you can tell from my grammer and spelling, I never attended college. When I do finally get a chance to go to college I will have to pay a high price for it. When I am there, I am there to learn, not make money for the college. If the college wants me to make money from them, they have put in a job offer like everyone else.
"`Ford, you're turning into a penguin. Stop it.'" -THHGTTG
Treat Schools Like Businesses, because that's what they are. Now, it sounds to me like some school employees (aka grad students) are unsatisfied with their contracts. What do employees do when the are unsatisfied with their contracts? The options are simple: quit to find something better, or organize a union and seek a better deal via collective bargaining and/or a strike.
Indeed, there have been a few cases in recent years where graduate TAs have organized and gone on strike.
Personally, I regard the arguments placed by schools about the persuit of knowledge for its own sake to be largly a fiction, propotated by those in power in order to maintain their power and exploit those under their control.
The NCAA is a prime example. Student-athlete? Ha! More like a bunch of guys getting payed less than minimum wage and helping the company bring in millions of dollars. Same goes for coders.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
That is a question, and an interesting one, but it's hardly the only question. There's also a serious issue of scholarly integrity. If the work is being done with the intent of publishing it as a scholarly work (as would be the case in a Journal article or PhD dissertation), there is a serious question about the importance of making the source code available. I am personally extremely skeptical of any scientific or technical publication which does not give sufficient details of the methods used that another researcher can replicate the results. In the case of software, that pretty much means that the source code must be available for others to examine and further develop.
That pretty much requires some sort of source code licensing. It might very well not be a pure Free Software license- it might be restricted to academic use, require citation of the original paper in the event that further developed versions were published subsequently, etc.- but the code must be available for other researchers to hack on. I can certainly think of some specific researchers in my field (who shall remain nameless here) who have published papers critically dependent on software that they declined to make available, and I remain highly skeptical of their data as a result.
There's no point in questioning authority if you aren't going to listen to the answers.
On the other hand, if you modify a pre-existing GPL program, they can't exactly claim rights to your work; it becomes illiegal to distribute (outside the university?) your work wihout first putting it under the GPL...
Then by using GPL'ed software in the stuff you produce for class, you are preventing them from doing this legally.
Besides, this is all going under the assumption that the university has a legal right to claim ownership of the stuff you produce in class anyway. I don't recall ever signing a contract mentioning that when I was in college. In the absense of such an agreement, the stuff I produce is mine and mine alone, and aside from 'fair use' (and the implicit permissions I'm giving the prof by turning my work in), they have no right to my works.
If it's GPL'ed, IBM would supposedly retain the copyright over the code added/modified by the employee, making the resulting code undistributable under the GPL. Remember: you can modify and add whatever proprietary bits to GPL'ed code that you want, you just can't redistribute it.
Stop thinking about GPL'ed code like that. It's a "parasitic license", with the operative word being "license". You can freely add whatever proprietary (and copyrighted) bits of code to a GPL'ed application that you want. The license's sticky point is the fact that you cannot redistribute it without surrendering all of your additions to the GPL.
Thus, a company can control an application based on GPL'ed code with proprietary/copyrighted additions and do whatever they want with it, so long as it stays within the company. They can't sell it nor can they make it available to anyone else without making the whole thing GPL'ed and giving up the source of their proprietary changes.
"Excuse me? When did tax-payers become entitled to profits made by using those taxes? Does this mean tax-payers can also be held liable directly when the government runs a loss?" Since when is the government supposed to make a profit off of my tax money. That money is supposed to be used to provide government services for me *not* to make a profit. Oh what I forgot many people think that the big corps already run the country. Well ok they do but the point is they should not really not like they do now. And yes as a matter of fact when the government runs a loss I do feel the effects of that through higher taxes or no tax cuts. I feel the effect by the government taking money out of private hands to finace the debt and yes we as the people do pay for the governments debts who else would? So is the GPL the "only" way no not really I do think it is the best way. But any other way would be good. Letting the Univeristy, state, whoever charge for it is theft because at that point they took my money to provide services for me (and the rest of the people) and unless I get a cut of the profits they are making a profit by using my money and I get jack. If it is made open I *do* get better tech, fun stuff to play with, and a better job good. If it is kept closed I get the shaft bad. And people wonder why I voted for Browne.
Cypherpunks: Civil Liberty Through Complex Mathematics. Those who live by the sword die by the arrow.
Just a minor thing, if it's GPLed, it's not public domain.
Employee of Inrupt, Project Release Manager and Community Manager for Solid
I think that if you work for a University, and you write some code for them as part of your job the code should belong to the University. They are paying you to write code for them after all. They don't need to do that. It should belong to them. But what if they make bizillions of dollars off of it? Well, there is this notion (that I agree with) that Universities should earn money from their employess and in return build a better University for the good of the community at large. When I worked at the UofMn we gave Gopher away for free, essentially. We did charge corporations a little bit (I don't remember $250?) to run our server code. But back then the Internet was a lot different, it was the only way to help fund the development of the code and to buy some servers (NeXT slabs and MacIIci's). So the University never made any money from it it, but what we did get we could have used. Some other projects after Gopher we gave away to some Universities when they asked for it. But the U owned all of my code. And I've never had a problem for that. Gopher put the UofMn on "the map" so to speak and that attracted other funding, students, and profs to the school. So the school became better. The academic world *is* different than a corporation, and I think it works well for itself. You just have to hold to the belief that Universities should prosper in order to educate more students and to allow for research that can not find funding via grants. Now, profs stealing their students code and papers...that is way different...I won't get started on that track.
//iacovou
Um, I'd have to say that recycling words is a primary foundation of almost any non-fiction writing, including college theses. This is exactly why footnotes, endnotes, bibliographies, and appendices were invented. Plagiarism is the unqualified reuse of others' creative efforts typically with the intent to deceive readers into believing it is your own. If a writer basically rewrote someone else's book with no major changes (i.e. plagiarized it), we would be rightfully disappointed in their complete lack of originality or creative effort. The same applies to programming. I see no indication that programmers are rewarded for reusing code wholesale or for simply rewrapping libraries (except to build interfaces to those libraries for other languages). There is no dichotomy here.
I do not have a signature
Any work done for exams (including coursework) in secondary school in Scotland is the property of the SQA. Fair enough, you might say, but for my Higher Still project I'm wanting to do something useful (maybe XSL / SVG to PDF). I won't be allowed to release it under GPL. I have to say that it is the property of the SQA and get their permission to publish my own work.
Is this right?
Professors, and the institutions, are asserting an intellectual property right to a student's notes on the content of lectures. They're dreaming. No such right exists.
Intellectual property rights only apply to ideas that have been reduced to fixed form. Fixed form means "written down" or "recorded"--only the fixed form of an idea is protected by copyright, the idea itself is not. Until the idea is reduced to fixed form it is just so much hot air.
For example, suppose I get up on stage and present a hilarious, moving expression--in rap--of the tribal customs of my ancestors (Scots) entitled "Getting Naked and Painting My Body Blue". If I have written those rap lyrics down beforehand, I can assert an intellectual property right. If you copy them down and repeat them, I can sue. But if I just start shouting extemporaneously, I have no rights--the words have not been reduced to fixed form.
An excellent example of this was Martin Luther King's I Have a Dream speech. Consider how many times you have heard that speech. Now ask yourself--why don't Dr. King's children collect royalties on that speech? They can't--King spoke extemporaneously. The written copies of the speech were made from film footage of the event.
In the case of classroom notes the situation is made even easier--the written notes reflect the creative work of the note-taker. Suppose that you and I attend a lecture by Prof. Chris Berman at the University of Bristol. My notes might include lots of information about what Berman wore, what the lecture hall looked like, whether he looked smaller or larger than he appears on TV, and what the general reaction of the audience was. Your notes might indicate what Berman actually said. The difference between my notes and yours is the creative content that you and I add. And what each of us reduces to fixed form is our intellectual property.
But wait, there's more...
The university isn't just wrong in asserting that it owns the rights to the notes--it is wrong to assert in its code of conduct that students do not. Unless a student surrenders his intellectual property rights to all creative work when he enrolls, the university is infringing upon his rights to dispense with his property (his creative work) for however much he can make.
The university is blowing smoke.
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You are a fucking moron.
As a Ph.D. Candidate myself, I've thought about and seen some of these issues in action.
The general rule is that univerities have the rights to all work produced by faculty and students at the university. When possible, the university will license technology to companies, and part of the proceeds are paid to the inventor e.g. the student.
Is this reasonable? Consider:
- grad students are generally paid by the school
- the school's equipment is generally used by the student for the work
- the work is being produced for the school as a requirement for the degree
From a pragmatic standpoint, grad students are in the employ of the university, which provides funding and equipment for the work. That they lay some claim to it is not unreasonable.
So, what to do if you want it to be all yours, to do with as you desire (GPL, sell, bequeath to your cats)? IANAL, but my sense is that the work must be done on your own time, on your own equipment, and be unrelated to your academic research.
For those considering grad school, and anticipate generating important work, it might be worth talking to students and faculty about a prospective school's attitude towards technology licensing issues. Some schools (ahem)UR(cough) are pretty thick, obtuse, and uncooperative, making it plain difficult to license your work. The school might compensate the student generously, or perhaps miserly, from licensing fees. Also, it may depend on the specific funding: coporate funding may entail free access to all work produced under the grant, fellowships may have stipulations regarding who claims the work.
Finally, it will also depend on the attitude of the faculty. If a group of respected faculty push for certain policies (better licensing fees, freedom to GPL, etc), the university may be more willing to meet those desires.
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D. Fischer
ShoutingMan.com
I'd ask, "If I produce a product on my own time, will the University attempt to assert ownership rights?" I've done work for companies in the past who had employment contracts that basically said, "anything you develop belongs to us, regardless of whose time it was on or whether it bears any resemblance to what you work on in your job." I'm wondering if universities have the same sort of thing. I don't know if these provisions are ultimately enforceable, but it could cost a boatload of money to fight it in court.
"If I have seen further than other men, it is by stepping on their glasses." - Michael Swaine
On the matter of copyright, I know that when I submitted my dissertation, there was a requirement to have it copyrighted by the university (U of North Carolina in this case). However, given that I had done my dissertation research at a US government lab (NIEHS), and any publications from the US government are automatically in the public domain, I didn't have to (indeed could not) copyright my dissertation. What it all comes down to is what the contract you signed says, particularly if you are a research assistant as opposed to a teaching assistant.
If you can't beat them, embrace and extend them.
Yet, at the same time, look at how many stories people are telling of "Oh, I had a good idea and the college was fighting me for it- so I dropped out and made a company and now I am Cisco" *g*
Okay, so that's exaggerated. But there are two points here:
- As 'brain drain' from universities continue and corporate requirements on universities tighten, universities will be less and less able to provide an education that is worth money in the real world. It'll be like waving an McSE when applying for a serious admin job: the university degree will be evidence that the person isn't good enough to have dropped out and gone commercial.
- By the same token, there's a subtler effect that I think is being largely ignored. 20 years ago it would have seemed radical to drop out of college and start a business- now you have colorful characters like Larry Ellison fulminating and inciting students to do this, AND he is an unbelievably rich man. It's becoming culturally expected for the _really_ sharp individuals to drop out and strike out on their own. This means that for the first time that I'm aware of, there is serious backing for a person's decision to drop out- and a lot of evidence to show doubters. It used to be a stigma. Now, if you're smart and trying to start a business (rather than dropping out due to apathy) your public image can be that of a potential Larry Ellison, and you can quote Ellison and recite lists of billionare dropouts to justify your decision.
- Finally, at the same time as this cultural change, the universities themselves are making it substantially more difficult to justify using them as a step in your personal growth- not only is it very expensive, not only is it increasingly unlikely that you'll get anything resembling an unbiased and truthful education, but if you are trying to get a head start on your career by using your youth and energy to think and learn and invent new things to build your future on, the university will pirate your work out from under you. This forces you to only do useless work at university- in some cases it may force you to stop thinking entirely for fear that the uni will lay claim to what you invented on your own time. So you are paying them to impede your growth, progress and learning.
I dropped out of college myself- over 10 years ago- 'before it was fashionable' you might say, but I could also say 'before it was obligatory'! Honestly, reading this thread and the things people are saying, it's horrifying. I hope people are ready to educate themselves, and willing to put in some effort towards getting a well rounded education as well- because at this point I couldn't recommend higher education for anybody. Yes, it's hurtin' as things stand, funding is desperately bad and dedicated teachers etc. deserve some sympathy- but when you look at these appalling IP costs and risks the whole thing reminds me of the record industry- i.e. "just say YAAAAH! NO WAY!"Where I work they specificaly ask you to signe a contract relinquishing rights to all code writen on the job. "My lawyer friend" (TM) says this is requierd because by default a work is owned by it's individual creators.
Can they take your work away without this? Also there is the question of "who owns a thesis". Those have been around for centuries. Back in the old days could a student sell his thesis as a book ? If so then the same aplies to any work done for grades.
Work done for cash is a diferent matter altogather and I don't see how a university wold be diferent from a private business. I.e. They have to make you sign this away.
As for the matter of GPL. This isn't actualy relevant. He who owns the code chooses the license. If you can GPL it you can also BSD it or attach an BSA stile EULA.
--= Isn't it surprising how badly I spell ?
My University had a stipulation that you were not allowed to submit previously published works for assignments. This applied to the arts as well as the sciences.
And the question was about work done while under the employ of the university.
Personally, I like the idea of working from a base of GPL'ed code. That way they can't do anything other than scorn you for creating code they can't distribute unless it is under GPL. It depends what you're doing. If you're doing some simple web forms or something, then using GPL'ed libraries is a good thing. If you're developing something which is meant to be distributed without the source code, then you're just sabotaging a project. (I know libraries are probably not the best example...)
Unfortunately it won't have the same bite if you wholly own the GPL'ed code because they could try to force you to grant them full license and ownership... effectively forking the code.
I know it's the case with my University that by submitting an application for admission, and subsequently accepting an offer of admission, you agree to a lofty "University Code of Behavior". Tucked in between a number of moral clauses advovating tolerance to other nationalities, anti-plagerism, etc, is a clause stating that all work done as a student falls under the scope of the U's "Intellectual Property Policy". The policy itself has to be obtained seperately from our "Industrial Internship Office." As long as this contract is legally binding, you could be stuck with handing over copyright ownership and/or licensing rights. The bottom line though is that this contract is so far removed from the University's admission process that very few students ever realise it applies to them.
"You know, Hobbes, some days even my lucky rocketship underpants don't help" -- Calvin
For example, at CMU the intellectual property policy seems to say that by default inventors own 50% of whatever they create. But this is only if the university decides to commercialize an idea. If the university declares itself to be uninterested (ie, the university doesn't want to take the risk of spinning off a business) then the inventor owns 85% of any proceeds after the first $25000 of profit.
Note that this applies to work that you do while sponsored by a research grant. For non-sponsored work (such as classwork), a student owns 100% of their work, and the university has no claim on it.
(Disclaimer: I am not a lawyer, I am just talking about my non-professional interpretation of the rules.)
I assume you're doing computer science.
My supervisor ("adviser" if you're American) always used to say that if there's no source code, it's not science.
It is that simple. You should not be allowed to publish any experimental results, be it benchmarks or what have you, without also releasing enough information for someone else to reproduce your results exactly. For anything nontrivial, that means releasing the source code. If you don't, the experiment is not reproducible, and if it's not reproducible, it's not science.
Yes, I feel strongly about this issue. :-)
BTW, the "nontrivial" disclaimer is important. If you're analysing an algorithm, while it would be courtesy to release a working implementation, pseudocode or enough English to allow a good programmer to reproduce it is of course sufficient. But, for example, I was at a conference some years ago where a guy from Microsoft Research presented a paper on removing priority inversion from Windows NT. Any experimental data from this research is not science without releasing the source to NT, because otherwise there is no way to peer review the data. After all, maybe their technique, when implemented, actually had the effect of avoiding another completely unrelated performance bug.
sub f{($f)=@_;print"$f(q{$f});";}f(q{sub f{($f)=@_;print"$f(q{$f});";}f});
I'm not from the US, so please pardon me asking =)..
Do students get cash for writing this programs, or do they have to pay less for the school if they code for the school ?
I think everything written in schools, should either be public domain, or under some Open Content License.
Before you email me, remember: "There is no god!"
If you're more interested in winning the right to use a free-software license than in which license to choose, you might do well to bring up the BSD license. It was a very early Free-Software license and has an excellent track record, with some of the most influential software out there released under the BSD license. It also has the big advantage, in terms of convincing University officials, that it has the backing of a major research University. "If Free Software is good enough for UC Berkeley it's good enough for us," is not a particularly logical argument, but it might be more effective in convincing University officials than abstract arguments about licensing fees and the like.
There's no point in questioning authority if you aren't going to listen to the answers.
microsoftword.mp3 - it doesn't care that they're not words...
Regarding the larger issue, as with many such discussions here, people don't seem to distinguish between what they think the law ought to be and what the law actually is. My advice to the questioner is to try to win whatever victories you can -- latitude to release software freely, a share in licensing revenue -- rather than trying to overturn the whole system next week.
And, to head off the inevitable response, I have no interest in anyone using "GPL" and "Rosa Parks" in the same sentence...
I am a graduate student very familiar with the issues of intellectual property rights. As a student you usually given a bit more leeway than most other university employees. Usually blanket intellectual property terms comes from whoever funds your tuition and salary (if you receive one). BUT - The university will believe it has rights to anything you use university resources to develop. Often PI's, not students, are the ones that make the opensource/commercialize decisions. The university, can put an enormous amount of pressure on a PI to go the commercial route if the technology is lucrative.
As a student you really don't have many rights to what you create using University resources. What constitutes use? The courts and universities tend to disagree. Some universities content that any use constitutes ownership, when in reality it is if the project couldn't have succeeded without the universities resources. This includes web servers, internet lines, dorm rooms, everything.
Also, to make matters worse, usually the university requires a full declaration of all intellectual property developed by you EVEN if the university doesn't own it. Software generally falls under the heading of copyrights, and each univesity has their own policy on dealing with that. I suspect that they are much more interested in CS depts' code than with thesis materials.
My suggestion to you is to talk to the Tech Transfer department for your university and ask them. They should be your friends, because if you piss them off they can make your life hell. Generally they want to see their students successful, so they will be willing to work with you.
-Moondog
I'm working on a project to promote "open source" in the academic field of Artificial Life. You can find our (preliminary) web site at http://open.alife.org. We also have a mailing list, open@alife.org, in which we discuss possibilities for introducing and promoting open source in academia.
An excerpt from our mission: "We all know that good science must be verifiable (or falsifiable or testable). Science in Artificial Life is mainly based on computational experiments that were executed to find the results for scientific publication. If the source code of these experiments are not available for the public, the experiments are not verifiable. Therefore, source code of the experiments should be made publicly available, and that's what the "Open ALife community" wants to achieve."
Currently, our main goal is to influence the peer-reviewing process of conference proceedings. If peer reviewers see a paper in which software has been used, the peer reviewer has to ask the author to include a reference to his source code along with his paper.
We have been thinking of using GPL for these publications but we're not sure whether the GPL offers us the things we need (for example - if someone uses your software in his own publication - does he have to refer to the GPL'ed software?)
--- Sigmentation Fault - Comments Dumped
I think a lot of it will end up depending on where the money to pay you came from. If it's purely from state coffers or donations, then it's the school's decision--as well as the donors--to decide how closely to hold the code. As far as stuff run on grants, those decisions are usually written into the grant paperwork.
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-- Geof F. Morris
Is that homework, is that other code, "prepared by an employee within the scope of his or her employment"?? (Homework certainly is not, or so Federal precedent says.) Is it "specially ordered or commissioned...in a written instrument signed by them that the work shall be considered a work made for hire"? (Is there a specific agreement signed by both sides for each specific work?)
Note that patent law does not have this kind of definition with regard to "work for hire."
No, IBM has stretched things in this regard beyond what the law allows. So have the universities of "gherehmee" and "feydakin".
I think it would be an interesting exercise pour encourager les autres for a student to aggressively pursue copyright infringement action against such a university, to the full extent of the example provided by the BSA and by Scientology: ex parte orders and all that (show up with a Federal marshall and an 18-wheeler, confiscate every computer in the place for your own infringement-examination at your leisure in the place of your choosing...)
fwiw, I note that Carnegie Mellon's CS department has started doing the "right thing" for class projects, etc., which as it notes are properly considered works of joint authorship, both the students and the university being the authors.
"My opinions are my own, and I've got *lots* of them!"
First, Universities and a number of other government entities are being asked to become self-sufficient. Basically if they provide a service which is of use, then perhaps they can recoup much of their costs through service fees, licensing, whatever.
:)
Personally as a tax payer I think it makes sense. It lowers my taxes and/or it provides an opportunity to delve into things that the money might not have otherwise been available for. (Assuming the U has $1mil, versus $1mil + $500k from fees)
There is a disagreement with this from an academic standpoint in that it does tend to push research towards directions which are marketable to commercial entities. Although the Universities still review research to decide if it is ethical, or a direction that should be gone. As one example, when I worked at the University I recall our Agronomy dept board rejecting a proposal from a seed company to research genetically altered corn which was resistant to certain herbicides. They went outside and did it anyway, and now have felt the wrath of the EU
Another issue... If you reject the notion that Universities should charge for their research, etc. because they are tax payer funded entities and thus their work belongs to the public.
If you take this stance, then really the only legitimate license is... no license, i.e. Public Domain.
The work belongs to the public, which means the public can do with it whatever they want.
By talking about the GPL you are taking a middle ground, saying that the public doesn't own the work, but the University also shouldn't be trying to recoup tax dollars by charging fees.
They argue that code written by a school employee (and this usually includes grad students) is a work for hire and that the school should retain ownership and control.
The question of ownership can be a no-brainer in typical employee fact patterns. In others, it can be tremendously difficult to determine, and highly fact-specific. The law is derived from the definition of work made for hire in 17 U.S.C. s. 101 and applicable related statutes.
The general rule is easy: If you write a program AS an employee, and writing the program is within the scope of your employment, then the work is a work made for hire, period. In such a case, the copyright immediately vests in the employer, and you have no rights whatsoever (under US law, anyway), unless you have independently contracted for them.
The big questions, of course, are whether you are an employee, in fact, as that term is understood in the Copyright context, and whether your programming was within the scope of your employment, in fact, as that term is understood in the Copyright context. This is where the rubber meets the road.
If not an employee, or the work was out-of-scope of employment, then the work is not a work made for hire unless: (1) the work falls within one of the enumerated classes of works set forth in the statute definition; and (2) the work was commissioned pursuant to a SIGNED writing saying it was a work-made for hire. If both of these two rules are satisfied, same result as above -- employer owned it from the outset, and you never had any rights.
Otherwise, you are the author and owner, and you own the copyright. HOWEVER, even if the copyright initially vests in you, you can, or might already have, assigned those rights away. This depends how your agreements with the University are drafted, and may depend upon specific policies.
Accordingly, the other side of this is that if you want to hire someone and get good rights to their code, you should have a writing reciting: (1) you own it; (2) its a work made for hire, and therefore vests with you; (3) anything that does not automatically vest with you, for whatever reason, will be assigned to you; and (4) employee will sign anything necessary to perfect your rights to ownership. There are stronger and weaker versions of this that may be appropriate, depending upon the circumstances.
Again, this isn't legal advice, which requires the application of general rules to specific facts, any one of which can absolutely reverse the result dictated by law. If you have any doubts, you should bring the question to a lawyer you have retained to analyze those facts for you.
Doing work in college? Does that actually happen?
I know someone in my college who paid off his loans because he got in on the VA Linux IPO - all because he co-wrote some GPL'ed utility program that got in the major distros... And I know he did it on his spare time, in college, and the university was NOT demanding any profits. That's how most college-based contributions arise... not from schoolwork, but from spare time. So while the issue is valid, it's mostly irrelevant.
Generally, if you have a good idea, do yourself a favor... don't submit it as a project to someone else (either for work or for school)... that's like trying to make a donation to a sperm clinic and instead they wind up keeping your balls...
Here's a question or two for them:
1)What happens if I release my thesis into the public domain under the GPL before I hand it in to my professor?
2)What if I am not paid to write my thesis? (If I am paid to write my thesis, may I charge on an hourly basis?
3)If my thesis is considered the University's work for hire, what will be the penalties imposed on me for speaking about my thesis in public? Is there a grace period during which I can legally speak about my thesis?
4)After I hand in my thesis, is it legal for me to think about my thesis, or must I stop thinking about it until I have legally purchased a copy?
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What happens when you outlaw guns
Putting aside for the moment the question about if this is a work for hire or not. (I don't think it is) The question is who paid to have it written. In the case of most state schools and just normal projects the answer is going to be the tax payers and this would of course include you. Think about it you pay taxes part of those taxes pay your salary. In this case since the public paid for the code to be written it should be able to be used by anyone who wants to at will. The only way to guarntee then that I can use the work that I have paid for the CS staff at the Univeristy of Utah to write is for them to GPL it. To the extent that your school also gets federal money I hav paid (at least in part) for you to write code and I should be able to get and use the code I have paid for. :) In that case you must GPL it this is the only way to make sure I can use this code. I think this points out how silly it is for people to make money off of projects that are funded with taxpayer money. Baffle em with BS and maybe they will se the light.
Cypherpunks: Civil Liberty Through Complex Mathematics. Those who live by the sword die by the arrow.
Do the Universities take & control & sell art professor's art?
If they did, they could kiss the faculty good-bye.
Maybe coders should consider their toils art and take a hike when threatened in this manner.
No contract, no university ownership. I'm no lawyer, but many companies (like the one I work for), require employees to sign documents stating that anything they develop during work hours are automatically owned by the company. IBM even used to make employees sign a document that stated anything ever written while working for them was theirs, including your own personal time spent at home. I would imagine that if you didn't sign anything which states your code is only for the university, it's not. Maybe the corporations just make people sign a document for safety's sake, but maybe it's because without a contract the ownership rights of the company or university would lose in court. Any ideas?
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