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Student Researcher Wins Patent Dispute
Matthew writes: "For years, student researchers at universities have alleged that the hierarchical system in academic research allows supervising PhDs to steal and patent inventions that were rightfully discovered by students. The Federal Circuit finally addressed these concerns by interpreting the law in a way that strictly protects the rights of student researchers. As such, student researchers will now be able to sue their supervising PhDs for any actions that are not in the best interests of the student researcher or the patent rights of the student researcher."
All patent lawywers are aplauding...
...their students inventions, they will not be motivated to have students to advice in the first place, and all innovation of the world, and civilization as we know it, will end.
</sarcasm>
I think this is definately a good thing. There are so many instances where a "higher up" takes credit for something someone else has done. Hell, some people have made a career out of it. I can think of several times in my own life when I didn't receive credit, simply because I was the "young guy." When I was 19 I was interning for a consulting company, and I happened to solve a problem for one of our large accounts. When the customer came by the credit was given to an older tech. When I approached my boss about it later he said, "We can't have them thinking our important projects are being completed by teenagers." I thought IT would be the ONE field where age discrimination would not abound, but alas, that is not the case. Maybe this will send a message to people everywhere that young != dumb.
"Da ist ein Technölüst in mein Unterpanten!"
Actual quote from a (weirdo) guy near N. C. State University:
"People don't invent things. People pay college students to invent things."
We ran into this guy at a chinese restaurant, where he was discussing his scheme to get a biochemistry major to develop implants for Marilyn Monroe (??)...
He said that he'd have gone to UNC-CH (just around the corner), but there are too many, you know, actual doctors there, who'd have asked too many questions...
There are plenty of weird people floating around colleges...
"Rather, the suit challenging inventorship must be brought by a party that has some interest in the patent, such as a financial stake in the success of the invention"
IANAL, but someone who is might be able to say if things like credibility, pride, or the downright disgust of the theft of something someone's poured a lot of time into are an "interest". I don't understand why if I claimed I invented the "XYZ" (when in fact my student did), the student would have no real legal recourse to say "Excuse me, that was mine, even though it's financially worthless".
Shouldn't laws defend the decency of humanity, and provide justice regardless of financial motive?
Now - can I have my patented one-handed-surfing back please?
We do not live in the 21st century. We live in the 20 second century.
In my opinion, it's common knowledge that great injustices are performed against students by their teachers in patents and journal entries. Although this doesn't change the policy of patents becoming the property of the university, it does protect the student a bit more. Just because a university gives a vehicle to get ideas/inventions out, it doesn't mean that they can claim them as their own.
I do believe that this corrects a widely practiced injustice.
Reb
Now law students can sue their advisors that steal researches of precedents of suing advisors that steal researches of precedents... Stack overflow.
That remember me my face when I've seen my work on the Internet - I was researcher in the Computer Engineering section of an italian University for my end-of-studies work - This work involved the creation of a real-time algorithm ( image processing ), and the implementation of the applications proving it was working perfectly. The trick is that, even if there has been conferences, articles (IEEE) about my work, my name hasn't even been mentionned once. Not that I wanted to be a star, I don't mind at all in fact, but I though it was normal to mention at least the name of the people who worked on the project ( approximatively ... only me :)).
That's the rule : you invite a student to help you doing something ( or do everything ) then if it's good, you take it for yourself.
I really shouldn't be that surprised. It's not like people with PhD's are immune to being ignorant theiving bastards. I guess this guy just decided he wasn't ready to be a full-blown evil genius quite yet; figured he better start with something small, and then work his way up to taking over the world.
sigs are for suckers
The welcome mat has been placed for the legal community to rile up intellectual property litigation on campus between students and staff. Hurray!
Intellectual monopoly rights issues just keep popping up everywhere. Take that as evidence that there must be something fundamentally natural and right about the concept.
--- -- - -
Give me LIBERTY, or give me a check.
If the appeals court decision indicates a duty of the mentor to the student, can the mentor be criminally liable for failing to perform?
In this case I don't see a single reason why Chou's mentor is even allowed to remain at the University, let alone be free. He lied, then used the University system against her, and finally used his authority to prevent her from redress. Flat out we don't need anyone, no matter how highly acclaimed, leading research groups.
This should lead to a complete investigation of any patents where he is listed as the sole discoverer.
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
The student' win is important, as it states the autonomy of the student in respect to his/her teacher/head. It is usual that head's names are added to scientific papers just because they are supervising the work of PhD students, even when supervision is just formal without real support to the student. The student, in such approach, is something like a slave, whose work is owned by the supervisor. The article says also that "...student researchers will now be able to sue their supervising PhDs for any actions that are not in the best interests of the student researcher", which gives supervision a more strong and formally bounded meaning, possibly increasing the quality of supervision itself and thus the benefits for the students.
While I firmly believe that the law does indeed protect students who invent things from having their innovations stolen, my concern lies elsewhere. The collegiate community has long been free from many concerns that private businesses must contend with in regards to innovations. I would hate to see this bring the level of freedom colleges have to a substandard level. Graduate students signing contracts and and more lawyers...what a horrible thought.
Anyway, I would just like to caution those applying this law in college settings to make the system the least cumbersome as possible. Free-thinking is the backbone of our collegiate system.
Of course we torture people, we need the information --Gen. Pinochet
Clear something up for me, does this mean that the Professor pays for all the equipment, helps the student work on their research or lets the student work on their projects, then when the student takes one of the ideas to the patent office he gets all of the credit for it?
Don't get me wrong, I think you should be able to patent your own ideas, but if they are not completely unique and unrelated to the work already done by the professor than you should not get all of the credit.
~ now you know
As it stands, if you can copy, and get away with it, you get the bit of paper. If the supervisor then wants to try patenting the idea, it's -them- that's heading for the boiling oil.
If the researchers might actually -earn- something off their work, then copying doesn't cut the mustard, and some real work might get done for a change.
However, we can't assume this. The reward system is not guaranteed to produce better work. Indeed, there is an excellent paper over on www.gnu.org that describes research which shows that the reward system can actually CRIPPLE real innovation and imagination.
Personally, I think that if Microsoft's fortune were split between America's schools, colleges and Universities, they'd be able to reduce the fees enough to have students to teach, and be able to pay teachers enough for them to have no desire to steal their student's work.
(With enough funding, America is capable of getting 60-70% of the population into higher education. If each of those people produced one piece of useful, innovative work, which was then their own to licence or free as they wished, could you imagine how far America could go in the next ten years?)
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
A thing to keep in mind is that the system is designed so as the PhD student requires a good amount of knowledge of her/his director in order to achieve his research efficiently.
What this thing condamns is no more than 'a robbery', not the fact that supervisors have some kind of paternity in the discovery.
Pointy Haired Dictators?
After looking at the linked article, it seems clear that the supervisor in this case did something exceedingly dishonest and deserved to get shot down over it. You don't steal your students' work, either by patent or by publication. Period.
However, as someone who advises students, I'm a little worried about the speculation that my students can now sue me and my institution for *any* action on my part that they perceive not to be in their best interest. What if a student feels that I talked him into working on problem X, but he would have finished faster and published more papers by working on problem Y? Can I get sued over that?
What are the limits of my legal responsibility? And more importantly, if I have a particularly risk-averse chancellor/dean/department chair, is this precedent going to chill the advising relationship between me and my students?
I am a little concerned by the breadth of the Federal Circuit's ruling. It seems that the panel went far beyond the issue-at-hand (i.e., that a student researcher has standing to bring an inventorship claim -- an entirely reasonable proposition, I think) when it found the student's instructer to be the student's fiduciary. A finding of a fiduciary relationship has significant implications: in general, a fiduciary owes her benficiary a duty of care, loyalty, etc. For example, the lawyer-client relationship is a fiduciary relationship. I'm just not sure that we want to start making professors the fiduciaries of their students, and thereby impose upon those professors a significant new area of legal liability.
In addition, the scope of a fiduciary relationship is a question of state law (in this case, Illinois law), not Federal law -- a fact not brought out in the linked article. Thus, the panel is not only stretching the bounds of the fiduciary relationship, but also imposing liability based on its "best guess" as to what an Illinois state court would recognize. I am not aware of any Illinois opinion that holds that a professor is the fiduciary of his student (altho since I haven't looked at the question, I'm eager to be humbled by someone smarter).
This seems a bit too wide. I mean, anyone can give bad advice, including PhDs. Just because the adviser thinks the student should jump off a cliff with their stupid project, should they do so? Somehow the liability should be limited to that which is deemed "unbecoming", I think. Otherwise, next thing you know, undergrads will be trying to use this precedent to force professors to give them better grades, somehow.
I'm sure that this comment will be unpopular...
1. How often does this theft really occur? I mean, does it really happen all of the time? Really? Can you provide evidence? We've all heard stories, and some of us have seen it happen. Still others have experienced this problem. But, how often does it really happen?
2. I asked the first question for the sake of these questions. Given that students now have more legal power, will this impact the student-mentor relationship? That is, will people (mentors, Ph.D.'s, etc.) be more reluctant to take on students knowing that students might actually turn the tables and claim rights to their work? (Sure, it isn't likely, but follow the line of reasoning and think about what this powershift really means.)
3. Would there have been a better non-legal solution? I can't think of any. Still, I am curious if this kind of problem could have been handled outside the law system. (I think it is unlikely since patents are, by their very nature, tied to the law.)
How to Download YouTube Videos
This is a real story from a lab I used to work at. We were working on a project with a major US group. We were trying to attach little bubbles of glass onto the end of hair thin glass tubes for a laser experiment. We were told the american lab would have no problem with this and that they had 10 techies and a $110 million lab so would get it done in no time.
Six months later and no sucess we gave the project to a summer intern to look at while we found him some real work without much hope of sucess. We can back to take him for lunch to discover him with the newspaper out, the problem solved and complaining of being bored. In this instance the Director of the site took great pleasure in giving him full credit 8)
Moral of the story - brains usually win and any student with one good idea is likely to have more they will get credit for
How did he solve it? Attached a vaccuum to the end of the glass strand and sucked the ball onto it and sealed off the other end with superglue.
is that professors/universities will now require students to sign assignments of patents as long as they work with said professor's/university's resources. Corporations do this as part of their hiring process, and I don't see why a student researcher wouldn't have to sign something to use the resources. University's do not have to let students use university resources.
Now this will give universities and professors a justified excuse to force students to give up their rights to their patents. The courts have turned a gray area where students could escape notice into a very black and white one where universities will have the upperhand.
OK, cool. I knew that wasn't going on in this case, but I just wanted to make sure about the wording of the law. Anyway, thanks.
~ now you know
by a lot of these resident phds being able to steal patent ideas from their students - without the better portion of them taking appropriate action against this, i can't help but wonder just how many of them did rightfully do what was required of them to earn their phds.
Patent law needs immediate reform.
The money and patent mongers play in
the equivalent of attack helliocoptors
and the students and engineers are like
the Afghans on the ground.
We don't stand a chance.
As a student one should focus on one's
subject. Instead students are forced to
learn arbitrary patent law.
Patents should never be inforced to
prevent others from using them unless
the others refuse to pay resonable fees.
In any case useful ideas should always be
used regardless of Calvanistic fantasys of
ownership. Yes, the ruling class of bankers
and lawyers has done some things well.
But in the case of patent law we see
extreame greed. The policy that is
foisted upon the rest of us by this power elite
is short sighted and does not promote
the free development of ideas.
Thus is it technically unconstitutional?
I must reread the constitutions statements
about patent law because I think the right
to do this was allowed for a reason.
Does current patent law violate the
constitutions reason for allowing it?
We need a revolution in thought concerning
patent law. We need honent people without
money mongering interests to come up with this.
But who?
-
-
The act, fact, or condition of holding something in one's possession, as real estate or an office; occupation.
-
A period during which something is held.
-
The status of holding one's position on a permanent basis without periodic contract renewals: a teacher granted tenure on a faculty.
So - that means he can't be firedWe do not live in the 21st century. We live in the 20 second century.
One of the many statutes to which I implicitly agreed upon entering Oxford University states that "The university claims ownership to various forms of intellectual property produced by students in the course of or incidental to their studies". This includes any patents I might be granted (almost certainly none) *and* any software I might write while I'm here.
Which means that I immediately have to stop work on any Free Software projects, because by licensing my work Freely I would be violating the university statutes. Since I'm doing research at the moment into computer networking -- and working specifically on transport protocol design -- this isn't exactly going to help further my research.
I'm trying to get the university to agree to let me release my work "if it will promote my research goals", but after two emails and a couple weeks without any response I'm a bit dubious about whether this will work.
Tarsnap: Online backups for the truly paranoid
Which is probably why it works. Think about it from a professor who patents student's work point-of-view. Not that I think it's a good idea or anything...
I don't know about the situation in the States, but in the UK our skint students would never be able to afford to sue anyone.
Very simply, the person who does the work gets the credit.
Also, this had nothing to do with software, and was about a victory for college students. Since many slash readers are college students, I can see the original article getting cut out and sent anonymously to many a college professor who has acted like a jerk over the years. Many of them will take advantadge of a students naivete.
And many will just blatantly say "everything you do is mine", which is something we do not want to encourage.
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
Most universities require graduate-level researchers to sign agreements that the University (and not the student OR the advisor) owns any patents that a researcher might need to take out. From what I've seen, universities are pretty divided on whether they make these patents public, keep them, or return them to the student. The basic premise of doing this is that the University puts up most of the financial resources needed for research. How fair is it for a someone to spend millions of dollars of a schoo's research money and then shut the university out of the financial rewards of that invention?
I seem to remember a case a few years ago where a student, wanting to benefit from his discover, had destroyed his university work, quit school, and then a year later finished his research. The school sued and won, on the charge that the student had committed the equivalent of industrial sabatoge.
The real problem is that advisors tend to steal *credit* for inventions, thus getting patent rights back from the university. This ruling just means that students don't automatically give their rights up de-facto to their advisor/department.
Simply require all mentoring professors to list once a year all patents that they are applying for.
Give the students a chance to review the list, and have a board to mediate any disputes.
Finally, have the same standards for academic honesty apply to the professors.
III.IIVIVIXIIVIVIIIVVIIIIXVIIIXIIIIIIIIVIIIIVVIII
"Congratulations, Mr. Jones, on your court victory. You now own the rights to the patent. Oh, by the way, here is the bill for all of your research time.
"What? You want us to give you a free ride because you're student? Ah, but you see, you've imbalanced our entire relationship: You agree to enter into slave labor for us for several years, and in return, we get to keep the credit for anything you do.
"But since you want to take this patent developed while using our equipment, and our labs, it only stands to reason that you're prepared to pay for it.
"Let's see... you've got this judgement, and we'll subtract lab fees, utilities, maintenance (gotta pay the janitors to empty out the bit bucket)... hmmm... tell you what, just give us another $85,000 and we'll call it even.
"You mean you can't afford that? Well, surely we can work something out. If you'd be willing to work here a couple of years, I bet -- Put down the laptop Mr. Jones, you're scaring me a little..."
"You're never ready, just less unprepared."
In the UK our industrial sponsors are more likely to screw us over than our supervisors.
Can't afford sue your supervisor? Try taking on Glaxo-Welcome!
Anyone quoted by a reporter knows how little they understand
Don't believe what you read is the truth.
I was developing a 5 MW laser and my professor stole it to put onto a B-1 bomber. I had the last laugh though! I filled a huge aluminum foil bag with popcorn kernels and hacked the targetting system of the laser so that when it the laser was fired, it hit the popcorn kernels and filled my professors whole house with popcorn!
Some current students will get a bag full of money,
but all next generations will have to sign something
that waives their rights.
The only result will be a twisted working relationship (Is this yours or mine?).
Simply attribute all rights to the University would
be a better choice IMHO.
This kind of thing happens all the time in university research labs, no matter what field it's in. Part of the problem is that in certain fields, such as CS or engineering, research can be translated directly into dollars, which raises the stakes for protecting one's own innovations. But university politics being what they are, it's often very difficult for a student to distance him/herself from the advising professor. Sure, a student may sue a professor for falsely taking credit for an invention, but what good is that going to be if the department then refuses to grant the student a Ph.D.? Is the invention worth more than the lambskin?
Another wrinkle to this argument is that it's often rather difficult to really know who invented what. Even if a student does come up with something that the professor hadn't thought of, what's the likelihood that the professor had nothing to do with it? In other words, what if an adviser's guidance contributed to 95% of the student's way of thinking? In that, it's like taxes: nobody wants to pay them, because they feel that they earned the money and deserve to keep it. But how many people could earn the money that they earn without the help of the social/governmental/business infrastructure in which they live and work?
:wq
It is an unfortunate reality that the goals and motivations of professors are not always aligned with their graduate students. A professor, even one that places their students interest as a priority, usually spends the majority of his time chasing funding. Most universities take ~50% of each grant to support facilities and non-research staff and there is a significant amount of pressure on the professor coming from his own department to acquire funding. This requires a large effort publishing, speaking, and writing grants. In a PR sense, the professor is selling himself and the granting institutions and the world at large view his laboratory and students as an extension of the professor. Optimally, the student graduates with a good education, solid research experience, and a few publications from a lab with an established track record. This is the best case scenario.
Unfortunately, dwindling grant sources have placed even more pressure on the acquisition of funding. The universities view patent royalties as a viable alternative to grants within technological fields and most have "technology transfer" groups specializing in harvesting intellectual property from labs and transforming it into funds. This system effectively funnels discovery from a large number of faculty, staff, and students into business group independent of the inventors. Students seldom gain any profit from these activities. Furthermore, not all professors give priority to their mentoring resposibility. On the contrary, many professors treat students as temporary low wage labor to be used to generate data (to publish, write grants, aquire funding, hire students...). Even students writing grants are seldom given intellectual credit within their field. Credit is reserved for the professor by default and even a conscientious professor usually has difficulty time distributing credit.
A graduate student's long years of toil used to be rewarded with an academic position. Professors and students justified the inbalaces of credit a temporary phase within an academic career. This has changed. Today, academic opportunities are far more limited and a student is fare less likely to remain within academia. As a result, the student has in fact become temporary low cost labor. More conflicts will occur as students recognize this.
First entomology, then virology, and finally bioinformatics systems. Bugs follow me wherever I go.
ATTENTION MODERATORS: MOD PARENT UP +FUNNY! Geez, that just made my morning
Back to reality for a moment, what's the real potential for a scenario like this to play out? I suppose there might be cases where universities had students agree to obscure policies involving something like this, although if that's the case, it'd be on the student for not reading through all policies before signing on.
I've always kind of felt this "what's the point" feeling at the prospect of doing research under a prof. I don't know what it's like at other schools, but at the school I went to, it's not like "I'm interested in X, and I'd like to do an independent study in it" -- it was like this: "You want to do an independent study? Well here are your choices: professor X is working on neural networks, professor Y is doing user interfaces" etc, etc. You're just helping them gain more prestige, etc., and in exchange you get your recommendation. I guess it works as a system for producing professors, but it is certainly a misrepresentation -- my idea of an "independent" study would be where you are given some freedom to explore what interests you and go where your mind leads you, whether it leads you further into academia, into the real world, or somewhere else. A system like that, I imagine, wouldn't just produce brilliant professors, but briliant graduates.
All your patent are belong to us!
Make your time!
How are patents working for Slashdolts in this case?
The court decision on this case came down last summer (June or July), and the article cited is dated Oct. 3 -- OLD!. Not only that, but this decision is only the beginning of this case. It just gave the plainiff the right to sue -- whether she wins the suit or not won't be decided for years. I asked Joany, my next door neighbor, if she was going to move out of our modest townhouse community now that the suit was decided in her favor. She told me it will be years, if ever, before she sees any of the $20 million (half of the $40 million the University got out of her work) she's entitled to.
Thank God I'm an atheist!
Funny story, though!
~~~
This is the /. What ever happened to Information Wants to Be Free? Do you feel the IP laws hinder innovation and slow progress? I know this isn't software but it all still information.
It doesn't matter whose name is on the patent--the patent needs to be assigned to the school or the organization sponsoring the research anyway. Some schools have fairly liberal rewards for patents while others don't, but the actual rights in the patent will in any case not remain with the researcher. If the research was paid for by public funds, as most biomedical research is, the public should expect (though in these times doesn't always get) the rights to any invention--that is, it should be placed in the public domain.
He has a right to use the equipment within the bounds set by the university. But what are those bounds? I'm typing this on a university-owned computer right now. If I switch over and start playing around at Pogo (I have an unreasonable addiction to Word Whomp), they can boot me out of this lab for using university-owned equipment to play games.
So, the question now becomes: now that universities can no longer allow this unofficial screwing, what policies will be put into place to make it official (and legal)?
"You're never ready, just less unprepared."
send her Godiva Chocolates. It's an investment in the future (and probably more secure than NASDAQ).
the university system will have to invent an "Indentured Student" status.
Oops, student loans take care of that, never mind.
I'm glad someone put a blemish on the academic community for what amounts to "legalized theft", now if only someone could break the "At will Employee" crap the world would be a happier place, I think.
Supposedly slavery was abolished. Not really, it has just been wrapped up in legaleaze, sugar coated and put on a contract for education and corporation's use as a weapon against its own students/employees.
Yes, I admit we all have to prostitute outselves sooner or later, but at least give us the ability to change pimps!
Heh, pit one corp/campus against the other...beautiful.
This university/company will give me 50% *and* allow me to use their equipment for a dollar a year!
Oh, my mind *is* a terrible thing...hehehe
If it is not on fire, it is a software problem.
When you planning to attend a graduate program of any kind - this is EXACTLY what you should be looking for. Alas, good faculty advisors of this sort are too few. Ask around - if you hear about faculty changing authorship of students' papers or insisting on slapping their names on students' work that they had no involvement in then avoid such faculty and even the department like the plague. Not much more you can do about it than that - trying to fight/sue your advisor once you are enrolled has far too many serious ramifications - and the student usually ends up the loser. Such faculty members will always be able to find other students to act as cheap labor - more often than not foreign students who are even less likely to protest their treatment.
More money for lawyers.
And, of course, you'd better get ready to flip burgers while you pay your way through grad school. The apprentence/mentor arrangement is officially declared obsolete.
Oh, yeah... Patents are Evile! Evile!
etc. etc.
That if the research is funded by a government grant, or any method of public funding, the patent rightfully belongs to the public!
"Congratulations, Mr. Jones, on your court victory. You now own the rights to the patent. Oh, by the way, here is the bill for all of your research time."
The university generally gets paid by taking a very healthy cut of the patent royalties, no matter whose name is on the patent. This decision wouldn't change that.
It's probably more than $85K too.
Ooh, a sarcasm detector. Oh, that's a real useful invention.
See, if you sign something, you know where your legal rights stand, instead of doing scud work for a University.
Universities can take a hint from the FSF and require that patents be licensed for everyone's free use. Since the University already gets ownership in the employment contracts, this removes the financial incentive for professors to claim ownership of student inventions.
I would say actually quite a bit. See the problem is not only the patent, it is the political fallout that occurs after it.
Many of these students have their academic careers ruined. Why? Because in my limited experience, university staff are the most backbiting people on earth. They have precious little job experience in the outside world that would harden them from an occasional failure and give them a painful lesson about screwing others over, and the only way to climb is to eat others alive.
Besides, to them, you are just another college student. I was never in Grad school, but this was even the way I felt with profs who knew me on a first name basis.
I am a news photojournalist in local TV. I have a good friend of mine that was refused a reading on his PhD FOR THREE YEARS by the University that he came from. The reason that he didn't get his PhD was because he didn't do their "scud work" (free work you will do that has the professors name on it, a kind of student labor extortion for MOSTLY grad students) after he spent years setting up charitable television trusts, and all sorts of other financial benefits for the University with television legislation (his speciality).
Because he was in limbo there... he left to take a prof job at another university. After three years, he still didn't have his doctorate. They second university fired him per policy, and he could never teach again after his reputation was tarnished. Then the University gave him his doctorate. Convenient? Hunh? He lost money and tenure. "Well, the first university TECHNICALLY DID GIVE HIM HIS DOCTORATE." See? Case closed. All because of some political crap after years of service to the university.
There is a bright side to this. He sued after years of complaint. It took a decade in federal court. He just finally won after probably ten years.
Now, the angry, stupid university that screwed him so much has to pay his court costs FOR TEN YEARS AND THE DIFFERENCE ON WHAT HE WOULD HAVE MADE AS A PROF... AND DAMAGES. Ka-Ching. He's set now.
Moral of the story? Don't ever fuck with someones future because of personal reasons. Especially under the banner of a large, overfunded, state-run University.
He had a slimy, slimy lawyer that is good at what he does. And you know what? I could have kissed that little bastard when I heard that my friend won. I now see the purpose of dirty little lawyers from their perspective.
Honestly, my friend is a nice, talkative, funny, goofy guy that never did anything wrong but refuse to sign over his name to a lazy prof who felt the urge to constantly innovate, and look at the trouble it caused. It ruined all of his plans... BUT HE GOT EM BACK. Now he can teach, but I don't think he wants to anymore.
He finally got married to his sweetie and bought a house. He's finally a happy, albeit older, man now. And his life is finally better.
A company/corporation:
- A corporation employs you and pays you a salary.
- A corporation does not charge you tuition or fees for use of its facilities.
- A corporation generally holds all rights to discoveries and inventions you make during your work with the company.
An University:- An University does not employ you or pay you a salary.
- An University charges tuition, lab fees, and graduate fees to use its facilities and personnel.
- An University generally holds all rights to discoveries or inventions you make during your research.
These two institutions are NOT balanced! I can completely understand and agree with a company which claims rights to a patentable invention you make during work hours and on work equipment. I can NOT understand how an University can even begin to claim rights, when the student is NOT employed by the university and PAYS to use their facilities! Any fruits of the student's labor are his- the University has already received their compensation - tuition!I'm having a very difficult time understanding how an organization being fully compensated for use of their facilities can try to claim IP ownership on things created with their service. That's roughly equivalent to paying the Property Owner of an office building a commission, based off of your company's profits, above and beyond your rent!
.... um, i lost you after "0110100001101001".
My graduate department offered a seminar on Research Methods and Philosophy. Not only was it a great seminar, but it dealt with some ethics issues of research. I wished there had been something similar at my undergrad school. A class similar to this could go a long way to setting commonly understood boundaries of student-advisor relations.
Of course, such a class is only as good as the faculty leader, who in this first case was intelligent and ethical. The next year we had a new department chairman who imposed a mandatory similar "How To..." seminar which focused on how students needed to learn to work hard (using his *UGH* hopelessly outdated special interests) so I wasted most of the semester reading up on his total crap and listening to his totally irrelevant (and perhaps emotionally disturbed) guest speakers. To prove that grad students didn't have what it takes, he always chose the least prepared and least intelligent grad students to chair any student discussions. And if the discussion started to make any sense, the prof would immediately cut it short. The guy was a total slime-ball.
So, what if the crooked professor in this article would get in a position to run the department seminar for ethical conduct?
Especially this one
If you feel that the Advisor is guilty of unethical conduct (as I do) let his employer know about it here.
I'm sure the University is already painfully aware of this case, they should also be aware that the public is too.
This link, "University of Chicago professor and world's leading expert on the herpes simplex virus receives $50,000 Bristol- Myers Squibb Award for Distinguished Achievement in Infectious Disease Research", shows that the Professor has gained much monetarily as well as in prestige by stealing his student's work.
Wanted: One witty yet thought provoking
Did I miss something or did the article fail to mention what the professor had to do to make amends? Was he fired? Was the student compensated by the university? It seems like the article only hinted at that.
Of course patents are only cool on Slashdot when they're owned by the poor, innocent defenseless students. Cry me a river. Why the hell wasn't there a fork with a patented symbol next to it?
First, let me say I read the judgement quickly and the specific details ofthe case indicate the student's advisor was slime and deserved stiff punishment.
However, I am posting because of the tone of many posts on this topic that imply that advisors routinely assume unjustified credit for the work their supervised students do.
I strongly disagree with that, and my experience as both a grad student and a professor gives me quite alot of experience in this area. I am a computer scientist and do systems research, which strongly selects for group work, so that is a factor here, but it is also a major area of dispute with respect to credit in this thread of discussion.
First, the student is not working in a vacuum. The assumption that the student is solely repsonsible for whatever they do it almost always nonsense. They join a lab engaged in an area of research. Their (slavish) salary is paid for by $$$ raised by the professor. Trust me, I did *not* get my PhD for the pleasure of writing grant proposals. Raising money is a painful way to spend time, but one cannot pursue most research ideas without it, and most students (me included) would not *get* their PhDs without a research project to fund them.
So, at the first level, the student's ideas are born in the context of the research group, group meeting discussions, and usually regular meetings with the professor.
Beyond that, most often the research topic is formulated in cooperation with the advisor, if not actually suggested by the advisor. Then the research is conducted under regular review and guidance by the advisor. All of this is a *lot* of work, **for the advisor**,and often goes more slowly than the advisor could do it themselves, but that is the process of education.I am happy to do it, but claiming that I am not contributing to both the idea being developed and to the student's education is simply not true.
However, when the student has an impulse (as I did when a student) to exclaim "Hey! Why should you be an author on this paper, I did all the work!" there is a simple test.
Consider the work that was done, and the group of people that worked on it. Now consider that same work and group as you subtract each individual from the group in turn and ask:
1) Would the work have turned out substantially
the same without the absent person
2) Could the "subtracted" individual have done
the work on their own
Without exception for my projects in the last 8 years the answer to #1 vis a vis the student is YES, I could have done the work myself or supervising another student, and the project would have turned out essentially the same. The answer to #2 is NO, the student would not have had a snowball's chance in hell of having the idea or of implmenting it on their own.
At this point in the conversationt they usually blush to some degree and agree that my being a co-author on the paper describing "their" work is entirely appropriate. About half of them suggest I should be the first author, but I follow the custom of putting the student's names first.
There are studnets that come up with a brilliant idea and develop it on their own. Then a sole-author paper is appropriate. Most of the time, given the discussion above, I would say that sole authorship is not justified.
To close the loop on the original issue, sole authorship by the professor is not appropriate either, unless the student literally ran all experiments as specified byt he professor solely for a salary.
I hope this made sense and seems reasonable but if not I will don my asbestos suit.....
> Any fruits of the student's labor are his- the
> University has already received their
> compensation - tuition!
However, many graduate school programs both waive tuition and provide a living stipend
Asside from tuition wavers and pay for research assistantship or teaching assistantship (more available in some fields than others) the universities offer something very different than corporations do: the education (or the degree, or both) one is interested in.
Yes, many jobs will teach you things, and even conduct or pay for training. What they will pay for, though, may not be what you want to be taught.
Of course, many students do not get good educations from their universities. This is not much different from paying for any other sort of expensive lemon. The student can, however, leave far before they are finished. At the graduate level, one needs to be vary careful in choosing an advisor that one will do well with, and be willing to change advisors (or even schools) if one is not being mentored to ones satisfaction.
There do seem to be a lot of lemon educations out there, and the schools can still maintain good reputations. This at least partially because some schools specialize more in selling degrees than education. In this case, it is the degree for sale rather than the education. (Indeed, in many fields, particularly those that pay well, the students are more interested in the degrees than the education, and so there is a good match.) Students just need to be careful to go to a school (and find an advisor at that school) that can and will give them what they are looking for. No, this is not easy. In fact it is particularly difficult at the stage in ones career when one is choosing a school. Such is life.
-Hil
I don't think you need ``vocational training'' to wash dishes. There exist what we call ``idiot jobs'', which require a) a reasonably able body, and b) the IQ of a retarded orangutan. Many of us work these jobs during our college years, for whatever reason, and shudder to think of the adults who work them their entire lives.
I agree wholeheartedly that the ``everyone should go to college!'' mentality is ridiculous. A quarter of Americans go to undergraduate school. Many of them are idiots. I know, I tutor them. They think they're still in high school; they think they can copy and paste the pseudocode the TA posts on his site, and get away with not *actually* understanding the basics of C++. (UConn apparently requires freshmen to take the introductory programming course. Psych majors are not *meant* to take programming. *shudder*.
I know, there are exceptions... but I tutor. I'm exposed to high levels of Idiot Radiation on a twice-weekly basis. It's not pretty.
Come on, only a tiny percentage of those who go to college *now* produce anything useful or innovative. The rest sort of slide through like they did in high school. Why would we want to squeeze more unmotivated high school kids into college?
I'm all for anyone who truly wants to get a degree going to school. But a lot of people just don't care, and you can't make them. If you try, you get an eight-year high school.
-grendel drago
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
I'm not sure that's as universal as you make out. My partner recently submitted her Masters thesis to the University of Cambridge, UK. In the formal information given to students, along with rules about what needs to be submitted where and such, there is a section that basically says students should be mindful of their rights to intellectual property, and mark copyrights and such accordingly. The University obviously requires a non-exclusive right to use the material, e.g., to put it in their library, but that's about it, IIRC.
I'm not sure what the exact state is on patents rather than copyright, but take a look at Zeus, a company based in Cambridge and started by ex-students. Their whole business is, apparently, based largely on one particularly good bit of work they did while studying. Given how well they were doing until recent economic events, I'm pretty sure people would have had a word if the patents weren't legit.
And what's this about "those of us in the real world", anyway? I don't know about you, but certainly I've never signed a contract that makes anything I ever discover (even on my own time) the property of my employer, nor will I ever sign such a contract. If I were going to do the kind of leading-edge research that many of these people do, I'd want to see some reasonable proportion of any future revenue/rights as well. Sure, if I'm being paid to do the research then the person paying will get the lion's share, as is only reasonable. But if my research is that important, and something only a select few people could do, they shouldn't mind letting me in on the profits a little as well.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
Indeed, you make some excellent points, especially with the role of Universities in providing a service (and what exactly that service is).
Any student who has expressly entered into an agreement with the University which compensates them for their work (pays for tuition, housing, salary, whatever) would, in my mind, be an employee of the University and the rights to innovation would justly fall in the hands of the University. It's the student's decision to enter that sort of agreement with the University that is so important.
Lemon educations are a dime a dozen. Anyone can buy themselves a degree from the college of their choice with little effort and even less learning. The dot-com phase left the world with plenty of paper CIS-degree holders, MCSEs, and CCNAs (among others) who completely lack the education expected behind their degrees.
In the case of most University research, it is done by graduate students shooting for a Masters' or Doctorate degree. In this plateau of the educational system, the lemon educations are far less common. A student does receive an education from doing their research, but the research is not their payment for the education: their tuition is their payment.
Of course that cycles back to students explicitly choosing to enter a contract by which they trade their research rights for monetary compensation, be it tuition, free housing, or a salary. For those who accept no such compensation from the University, I am glad to see some protection of rights to research imposed by the government.
.... um, i lost you after "0110100001101001".
The first is a student paying his/her own way - no question.
The second is a student on a scholarship - still no question.
The third is a student on a work/study programme - then there might be a question.
Remember that most of the work that wins awards later in life was frequently done when people were in their teens and twenties. Especially patentable works.
If we continue the ageist ripping off of doctoral candidates for the profit of either the university or the supervising PhD, then we perpetuate a labor imbalance.
A brilliant patent is worth no less just because you're still a student.
And just as RIAA are vampires living off the fruits of the labors and inspirations of musicians, so are the universities and supervising PhDs in regards to doctoral candidates and their patents.
But it would still be better if it defaulted to public domain patent status, as was common in the first half of this nation's history, instead of private domain.
-
--- Will in Seattle - What are you doing to fight the War?
The law is VERY clear on the matter, as the circuit court mentioned. Being listed as co-inventor is very much a right of an inventor, and they threw it out because the inventioned would have to be assigned to the university anyway? Excuse me?
I think that the defense should have had to prove that the lower court hadn't been bought.
Education is a better safeguard of liberty than a standing army.
Edward Everett (1794 - 1865)
There's a saying ... "Damned if you do, damned if you don't"
Basically there was no choice in the matter. The guy had already stolen her invention and patented it himself.
So in this case she got fairly compensated for what she had created when its ownership was stolen off her.
PS, click the link in the blurb for this story and have a read. You might understand the case better if you do.
How amusing is it that a federal court had to tell an adult college professor to not be a theiving bastard? Holy gheeze!
Dumbass to add to your smartass.
Review the intellectual property and patent law for inventorship, US256. Two kinds of people can be called inventors, those who had the idea (proven by blueprint or documents) and those who bring the idea into practice?