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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."'"
Oh for the days when universities were places for learning and not little more than businesses and when the students were more focussed on learning than making a quick buck or some recognition.
Don't protect it.. tell everyone that IP, freely!
https://www.eff.org/https-everywhere
Always good for someone to own the rights to research they've done. In the age of disregard for IP, I'm not sure how much it will do, but it's certainly a step in the right direction.
These are not "intellectual property" rights, they are "moral rights" of authors.
The distinction is important because one can be opposed to copyright as an artifical right created by the state but still be in favor of natural moral rights.
I don't think it's just to use force to prevent you from making a copy of one of my poems; but represent yourself as its author and I'll kick your ass.
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | my blog
You cannot wash away blood with blood
Is this a good thing that students get protected from the random professor who preys on a student's work and makes it their own or are we teaching values and mistrust now at that are at odds with a mostly open society and education?
I'm not against students recieving credit, but as with patents, I'm against people ardently claiming credit for the most insignificant things.
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.
Employment contracts often stipulate that the employee has relinquished intellectual property rights in the field of business of the employer.
This same idea often applied to graduate students that are paid to help out a professor.
If an employer paid you to write a chapter for a book or to invent a widget, you may not have any intellectual property rights over that work.
If you helped a professor in a lab - and if he's paying you under terms of an employment agreement, that agreement could very well stipulate that you have relinquished all IP rights. Read that agreement before you start to work. If you have a problem with it, negotiate the contractual terms.
This is how a company can "award" employee a $200 "bonus" for an invention that's worth millions of dollars.
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.
There is more to science than physics!
www.iomalfunction.blogspot.com
If any sort of this nonsensical "Intellectual Property" will become the standard way of producing research results (as opposed to old-fashioned attribution, to which the students have full rights and the University a moral obligation to protect) then this will mean the death of acedemic science. Period.
If every piece of every half-baked paper will cost $50 to read it, a typical researcher will end up with no viable access to any sort of external research.
But of course the further escalation of "Intellectual Property"-related stupidities is only bound to increase in pace, given how hell bent the "opinion makers" are on introducing greed "motivators" where they were never needed or wanted in order to divide and parcel out the body of human knowledge amongst the "worthy" mega-corporations and billionaires who will become the de-facto gate-keepers to that knowledge and subsequently, for all practical purposes, Lords and Masters of the rest of the humanity.
I foresee troubled waters ahead.
-Protect IP
-Patents bad
-Steal the music
There can still be some pretty extreme cases that are clearly wrong. A friend of mine was a grad student at the UW-Madison where she wrote a paper (she was the first author, and the professor was the 2nd). When the professor submitted the paper, the porf switched the order of the names (made themselves fist). When the paper came back from review, the prof switched the order back, so to the student it still looked like they were the first author. This was all done in Microsoft word, with reversion history being recorded, so it was pretty clear what was going on. I'm not sure this is illegal, but it is clearly immoral, and exploitative. I looked at the University handbook, and it was clear that if a student had done this, they would have been violating a rule. It was unclear if there were any rules like that that applied to faculty. I wrote a letter to the head of the department, but never heard back.
If anyone knows the head of the Bio-eng department in Madison, maybe ask him why all of the phd students for some of his professors quit after getting their masters.
This is very different from copyright enforcement. This is about attribution. Huge difference.
Most graduate students would be more than happy to have thousands of people read their thesis. The problem arises when they don't get credited, or someone else claims ownership.
This is very different from students wanting $20 from you to read their paper.
"Knowledge is the only instrument of production that is not subject to diminishing returns" -Journal of Political Econom