Slashdot Mirror
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."
...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?
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
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.
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.
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)
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 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.
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
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."
I've NEVER seen a tenured prof fired for anything BUT sexual harrasment. Errr...except Bob Knight (yeah he was considered a tenured professor) and that was only after he publicly attacked a 'disrespectful' student because he refered to him as simply 'What up Knight?'.
Seriously...you have to do something that is soooo in the publics eye and so far out of character with a university that it can't ignore it anymore before you get fired as a tenured professor.
Heck, my office went through with something like this about two years back. An employee of mine decided to do her Senior Thesis as a project with my department. She had gotten approval to do so by her academic department. The Academic Department did not offer her any guidance or otherwise other than this approval and suggestion on the scope of the project which happened to be 'Do What The Customer Wants'.
Anywho, she gets the project done, does the write up on it and turns everything in...source code and all. 3 Months later, I find her professor is trying to sell the code that I paid for and claim that it is his. Now, my department is a non-academic department at the same university..but it is entirely funded by grant work. We pay rent to the university and pay the university a large amount inwhich they turn around and pay our salaries. In a sence, we are paying to work here because we can (and some cases have) take the research outside of this institution and keep a larger chunk to ourselves.
Ok, that complicated things a little more. We 'work' for the same organization its a little harder for one department to get satisfication from another. This professor is now trying to sell the code to other universities and other organizations saying that he wrote it himself. We had to escallate this to a legal means using our grant provider (who legally owns a big chunk of our research) outside of the university and then bring in internal arbitration.
At this arbitration, this professor reiterates the fact that he wrote 99% of this code and she helped him. The fact of the matter was that since this was for her senior thesis, I helped her get direction on this and explained theory behind certain ideas in implementing my research, but she did 99% of the coding...with maybe 1% of it being me.
The professor that she was working with academically couldn't even understand the first bit of this, and couldn't even follow the code to reverse engineer it. I had to install it on his computer because he had never done anything like this before and couldn't follow the simple directions given on the cdrom.
The subject area of this research (psychometric shtuff) was something that she didn't know much about and the professor knew less of. In the end, he claimed that it was all his idea, it was his code, and it was his project...much to the dismay of our grant provider and my boss. Arbitration was the only way to get this out in the open and it was more or less determined that this professor was lying and had stolen the code, BUT that as it was freely given for a class assignment, the university could asurp it and do what they want...even though it was paid for by someone else. He was no longer free to sell it himself without the universities permission, along with the owners of the software.
Needless to say, everytime he's had opportunity to sell it, I've consulted with the grant provider and we've simply given a site license to them. I'll be damned if I let this asshole make any money off the deal, and they back me up on this. They paid for it, and they aren't going to let anyone else make a profit either. As he is guarenteed a certain percentage as pursuant to his tenure agreement, we are making sure that he gets exactly 49% of nothing.
So back to the point, this stuff is expected in academics. If ya don't think so, you are fooling yourself. Universities know this, and will go out of their way to make sure that their proffesors are paid well, even if its not by them. They don't want to take any chance of anyone thinking they are showing any improprieties, so its all swept under the carpet.
Luckily in my case, the stuff we were working on was supposed to be free anyways, but now we are forced to give it away for free 'under contract'. My student got screwed and her reputation on this campus was blemished and the professor simply walks away from this...though enough folks know what a sleeze and an asshole he is now...and I make it perfectly known on this campus NOT to do anything with him that he could injure a student with at a later point. None of my employees will ever work for him again, and as I've had some of the most talented programmers on campus vieing to work for me, it means that his pool of students that he can get to do his work for him is less than it was a few years ago. They make it known to the other students as well...the only thing I can hope is that he doesn't publish and the university will get sick of paying him...but that won't happen. Tenured employees never get fired...
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.
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".
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.....