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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?"
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.)
Good point... but I just want to bring up something OT then...
:) I found that my limited Unix experience was almost of no use when it came to configuring and using basic programs under Linux, due to my unfamiliarity with the overall environment. My needs in a personal computer are better fufilled in Windows 98 at this point... although I admit that I would like to be more creative on my PC than Win98 allows. It's my basic needs that were awkward in Linux, and from what I understand they haven't gotten any less awkward since. It might be different if I had money to buy a spare computer with all supported hardware and a better, more stable distro... but I don't. This is probably what stops a lot of people from getting into it.
Open source/GPL (two different things), in my eyes, does not mean "profitless". Yes, in the real world, that happens to be the way it works, but not necessarily so. I believe that perhaps old software models become obsolete in the face of OS/GPL software, but that doesn't mean that there's no business to be done with it...
That said, how come releasing the source effectively kills revenue for a program? Or, more directly, why hasn't anyone figured out how to make a profit off of something that you can see how it works? Is the way the software industry works akin to the idea of a secret recipie?
For example, nobody but The Coca-Cola Company knows how to make Coca-Cola. If they released the recipie for their universally popular soft drink, they could still make money selling it, as a distributor... however, they would become drastically less profitable and/or go out of business due to everyone ripping off the recipie at home. But why can't Coca-Cola still make money selling Coca-Cola then? Making chocolate milk isn't hard... but people still buy Yoo-Hoo. There are 5 billion shampoos out there that use the exact same active ingredient, yet there's a lot of money being made on shampoo...
Still, most people assume that releasing the source is the end of a project's ability to make money - aside from mercy donations. Even when that's clearly not the case with some programs, those situations are seen as exceptions to the rule. And, of course, the GPL means that you CAN'T make money from directly selling a program covered by it - so you'd have to be rather creative to make money writing GPL programs.
This is the big issue that I don't understand with the Slashdot crowd.
I understand why everyone likes the idea of Linux, and Open Source, and the GPL... they're very fresh, very innovative movements. But what I don't understand is how everyone got to this point without addressing some of the gaping holes in some of these ideas. On one hand, the general situation/idea is that no one's making money off of this... so then how do you expect it to really matter to anyone? Businesses don't trust hobby projects (no matter how good they are), the software industry would rather make tons of money like it has been with its "cathedral", and end-users want a glossy, appealing finished product. On the other hand, it's very possible for these concepts to succeed in business - so then why isn't there a lot of progress in that area? Don't you think that all of these movements would surely come to light in grand fashion and be embraced by the world if there were ways to get people motivated with more than anti-capitalism and personal glory?
I'll say this, at the risk of my karma:
* I don't have Linux installed. I had it once, but I never used it much. I personally found it awkward and counterproductive. Maybe that's because it was RedHat 6.0
* Open Source is a fine idea because it promotes code reuse, peer review, and shared programming research/discussion. Its biggest problem is that it hasn't done anything substantial, yet. Code reuse is still a touchy subject with issues in intellectual property, compatibility, and liability. There isn't a computer language that fits perfectly with Open Source and mass distribution yet - most languages are proprietary or obscure, and C/C++ is not the best way to communicate ideas with human beings (there's no standard/automatic system of commenting code to make up for this, either). Plus, anyone who wants to make money will not distribute source code to the world when it's not usually justifiable or practical. These things have to be worked out... writing code for a hobby OS, arguing on the web against the naysayers, and trying to convince your boss to hop on the bandwagon are all not productive ways of helping the movement. If there's anything we learned so far, it's that working together isn't as easy as it sounds.
* The GPL and the FSF are counterproductive at this point. The GPL, aside from all of the practical "negatives" of Open Source, is a house of cards. As a rational thinking person, the GPL is well written and comes from good intentions, but it stands useless if (or when) a judge decides that it cannot be upheld. It needs to be tested in court, but it's a little late for that now. Then, there's the problem that it's viral - it wants to infect everything that it touches. I'm not saying that it's a bad idea to apply the GPL all the time.. but sometimes it is, for some situations. Therefore we must all remember that it's a SPECIALTY solution for a license, and that applying software licenses isn't always an easy, cut-and-paste task - we need to promote more thinking and communication on this idea, not simply adapt situations to the GPL whenever possible. And finally - the FSF movement is a radical, extreme, revoltionary concept that should be taken with a grain of salt. It all comes from someone who is very brilliant, but also who has a different set of morals and values than most of us. If we accept his values and promote them to the world, we're turning him into God. I get the feeling that there aren't many people thinking about things like he is... and it's like a herd mentality at this point.
I just wanted to say all that because I disagree with the idea of the GPL as a "poison pill". (although it's funny here) There's a lot of good ideas and good people on Slashdot... there's a great potential for this crowd. I simply wish that people would stop getting caught up in the stupid shit and start pushing the limits of our intelligence. Then maybe we all won't have to worry about working 60 hour weeks and having no lives on the side...
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?
--
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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