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Canadian University Students Taught To Protect IP
innocent_white_lamb writes "Graduate students at Carleton University (Ottawa) are taking steps to protect their intellectual property, at the same time are insuring that they are being properly recognized for their work. This is in response to the increased commercialization of research done at universities, and high-profile cases of copyright infringement by professors at the University of Toronto and Indiana University. 'The initiative will include workshops and a handbook outlining what would constitute an infraction of students' intellectual property rights, Howlett said. Examples include a student not receiving authorship on written work, or having a professor take credit for their work. "This isn't an indictment of profs at all," said Howlett. "It's just to ensure that students' rights are protected in the case that it does happen."'"
I'm not sure if you're aware of it or not, but Ottawa is Canada's equivalent of Silicon Valley. There are a number of high-tech giants in that area with significant R&D facilities, including Nortel, Corel and IBM. Much of IBM's work on Eclipse is done at their Ottawa labs, for instance. Waterloo, where I attended university, is growing quite significant in this area, as well. But Ottawa is still the leader.
Carleton University has had close industrial ties for years. Michael Cowpland, of Mitel and Corel fame, earned his masters and doctorate from Carleton. This close relationship with industry is a good thing, as many of these companies have in turn provided financial support to Carleton for a variety of initiatives. According to relatives of mine who study there, companies like Nortel and March Networks have funded various engineering laboratories. The university likely would not have had such labs were it not for the financial support from industry.
From what I hear from my relatives, Carleton does need to be more careful about their commercial collaborations. But it's not in the area of engineering or design. It's when it comes to their food services. An exclusivity contract with Coca Cola apparently results in there being only Coke available on that campus. Similarly, the company they contract out their food services to, Aramark, provides terrible service and terrible food, but is willing to charge students an arm and a leg.
So Carleton probably has the right idea collaborating with industry when it comes to their research. But their collaboration with companies for various services on-campus should probably be reconsidered.
As a Computer Science student, I feel that I'm being taught pretty well what to look out for, and how to protect my rights. And at least where to go, or who to ask if I have concerns. I'm not sure how other majors are at my school though. While related to everyone in any career area, I know that Computer Science views IP as a pretty high priority.
Clearly, you haven't gone to graduate school. If you had, you would be aware that most research is done by students. Professors act more as editors than as authors, though often times they take most of the credit.
This is referring to student research outside of the classroom, which the majority of students do not participate in, it has nothing to do with term papers and all that plagiarism debate going on /. lately.
The idea here is not so much "IP" in the traditional sense, but rather to stop students who are research assistants from being screwed over by some professor who wants sole credit on a publication. I have work getting published, and while I (and most anyone who does academic research) do not want people to have to pay to cite us or just read our work, you can bet your ass we want our names in there though. If anything, this is showing students how to basically open source their work and not let other people take credit for it. I have the good fortune of dealing with profs who will give students primary authorship if the kid did more work than they did, so this thing isn't much of an issue to me personally.
This is not teaching students to commercialize their research, in fact that goes against the very nature of scientific research and intellectual advancement.
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Georgia Tech has the same deal. We had the only Pizza Hut in the world that served Coke products (Pizza Hut was owned by Pepsi). It may still be the only one. Doesn't make it any cheaper, though. It's up to $1.40 for a bottle now. The difference all goes to the school.
Ah, there's some confusion here.
"Moral rights" is in this case a legal term, a translation of the French term "droit moral," refering to legal rights of creators regarding personal and reputational value of a work.
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We used to be an exclusively Pepsi school, but I do think this has changed now.
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I went to University of Ottawa, the other university in Ottawa. Aramark does have terrible food. Aramark owns food service for just about the entire school. Not only does the food suck, but they won't hire students to work at the facilities. Again, Coke bought U of O too, so nothing but coke. I don't think this is different from many other universities, I think a lot of schools do this. I not really against it. If it lowers tuition for the students, then it's fine. If you don't want to drink coke, then you can still bring your own drinks on campus. Funny story, somebody started a campaign to take down the Christmas lights because they were red and white, and thought they were a big Coke advertisement. Never mind that red and white are traditional Christmas colours.
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Moral rights are traditionally part of IP law. Your distinction is not so clear cut either - moral rights may include (depending on the applicable law) the right not to have a work included with others where it might be demeaned, for example. So you cannot permit copies arbitrarily and still assert all your moral rights. They are closely linked.
Dude, those are regional offices and head offices. Yeah, you'll find those in Toronto, just because those companies have lots of clients in Toronto. And being the largest city in Canada, Toronto will of course be home to many corporate head offices. But all you'll find there are paper pushers.
Most of the real technical R&D work is not done in Toronto. It's done in Kanata, Waterloo, Montreal and these days Calgary.