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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."
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
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.
Note that it says "such as" a financial stake. I believe that by stating they must have "some interest" in the patent, they are trying to prevent unnecessary lawsuits. Even if something is financially worthless, as would be the case if the university (who owns the patent) didn't pay royalties or the product were to be given away for free, there may still be a significant interest in the ownership of the patent since such things tend to advance careers, etc.
--- Don't be a player hater: I meta-mod ALL negative mods as Unfair.
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)
Chou was suing to be *included* on the patent, not to become the new patent holder. In reality, the patent goes to the University which payed for all the equipment, allowed the research at its facility, etc. But the student is entitled to some of the royalties because they were a major part of the research. The faculty-member would still, rightfully so, have their name at the top of the paper. This faculty-member stepped too far, however, and made his name the ONLY one at the top of the paper.
--- Don't be a player hater: I meta-mod ALL negative mods as Unfair.
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.
I also find it appawling, that the professor hasn't been fire
One word. Tenure.
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"
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.
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.
But I agree that the University (as probably all others in the US) would be well advised to take action to avoid this happening again in the future (and thus a potentially large lawsuit):
"Content's a bitch."
it just makes no sense
The original post compares to -- and effectively satirizes -- a standard RIAA argument that record labels need to keep the copyright on the music that they put out even though it's created by others; If record labels don't keep the copyrights to the music, they have no incentive to bankroll musicians, and then recorded music as we know it will end.
Or then maybe the argument for software patents...
-sker
nonsig. unsig. desig.
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.....