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."

Comments

A good thing.

[TechnoLust]

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.

That's the way it is

[dda]

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.

Re:Long Time Coming

[MadKeithV]

They already do, as do full Doctors. If you read the entire article, you'd have seen that the patent ownership was given to the University, but internal regulation at the University stated that part of the royalty payments should go to the inventor or inventors.

Re:Oxford already does this

[cperciva]

Why couldn't you release the software under your favourite license, and assign the copyright to the university, for example?

If the university owns the copyright -- which, under their statutes, they do -- then I can't release the software under any license.

There is a clause which restricts University ownership of software to software "which can reasonably be seen to have commercial potential", but that doesn't really help much... I can't exactly send daily patches off to the university for approval as "not commercially viable".