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IP Rights For Games Made In School?
Gamasutra has a story questioning whether schools should be able to hold intellectual property rights on games created by students. The point out a recent incident in which a development team was unable to market a game they created, and another situation where a school overrode the creator's decision to withdraw the game from a contest.
"What irks Aikman is that, after graduating, he and his team approached DigiPen, hoping it might change its policy and make an exception for the award-winning game, but the school wouldn't budge. 'They were dead set on not setting a precedent because, if they let us keep the IP, they were afraid other students would want the same. But I believe there's something wrong with the idea of DigiPen owning games it has no intention of doing anything with, while discouraging people like me who could really make use of our efforts and use it as a springboard to a career.'"
And I thoughr I was the happiest guy I know.
signature is pants
--
So who is hotter? Ali or Ali's Sister?
Just a reminder: it's really hard to pre-sign over copyrights to something except by being an employee of the institution in question. If these guys didn't sign a paper explicitly transferring the copyrights to the specific game then the institution doesn't own them. It might have a contract compelling them to sign the rights over. The contract might even be enforceable. But it doesn't -currently- own the copyrights.
Moderating "-1, Disagree" is simple censorship. Have the guts to post your opinion.
If you want to keep your IP, don't go to a school that will take your IP. They'll drive away talent, and before long they'll be irrelevant.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
isnt this the same as the school claiming to hold IP rights over all of the drawings I make in my art classes? i see no difference, but in that context it seems awfully ridiculous.
I'm sad to have to finally admit it, but no matter how you slice it, in today's world, might always makes right.
You will always be outmuscled by a greedy bureaucracy, unless someone even bigger protects you.
What a waste. Go to a university, get a BS in Computer Science and make your own games. You are going to a game school and making a game for that school. What do you expect?
In a work for hire scenario, the one paying gets to keep the IP. But students pay the school in exchange for knowledge, so why does the school get to keep the students' IP?
Don't sign contracts like that.
Back in the '90s and before, most universities claimed IP rights only on work "done for hire" which included work done as an employee or a paid research or teaching assistant, or any work reasonably related to those duties but not work totally unrelated, not work by unpaid students, and not work that was pre-arranged for the rights to stay with the inventor.
I don't know what it's like now.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
I'm just askin'.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
I'm currently a PhD student at a UK university and my uni has already said they will take any commercially expliotable IP from me as and when I make it - you didn't think intellectual property was created to help producers did you? This is despite the fact that they are being paid to have me there!
still, for me, if the uni doesn't take my IP then the government will, but that's less common
Here's from the president and founder of DigiPen:
"I am not saying that we will not change in the future," he adds. "But, in order to do that, we need to talk to the industry to see what they feel would be best. Our program advisory committee is made up of the best of the best companies in the world. So far," he says, "they are very happy with our policy."
Yeah, I'm sure there's no bias on that board whatsoever!
http://greenobyl.com/ please.... think of the children!!
At University of East London, they had exactly this argument at the Computer game design degree, and with the art department. One artist wanted to publish some work separately and was told that he should NOT submit it as coursework.
My solution, before you sign the paperwork for enrolment, create a company that you own, set up a contract with that company where you sign all of the rights for the work you create to the company, THEN sign the enrolment forms. Then the university would have the option of suing you as an individual for signing your enrolment papers, when you did not own the rights you were asked to sign away. But you will retain ownership of the work you created.
Note IANAL, and "This is a method that has not yet been tested in the courts of law". That said, when i checked up on this, i was told that the uni probably wouldn't sue, as they don't want to risk getting a precedent run against them. YMMV. Don't listen to me, get some proper legal advice instead.
There goes my karma... and the schools will start agreeing with Steve Ballmer too.
The article fails to mention that Synaesthete won $2500 at the Independent Games Festival at the Game Developer's Conference in 2008. I wonder where the $2500 went? To the school? To the students? I guess it should go to the school since the school owns the game right? Or did they give it to the students because it is their game?
They don't want to set a precedent. Fine. Make them an offer, you buy the rights to your own game, perhaps for a nominal fee like a dollar, and then all parties involved sign non-disclosure agreements as to what the terms of the agreement were. They'd be smart to try to retain some equity in the game, might be a homerun, but still. IP law doesn't exist to stop the development of good idea, but to encourage them. Were they to actually go into court and argue the former, it's hard to see how they'd win.
A lot of that is inertia. It isn't like the photos are worth a whole lot to the photographer as an artistic work, it just happens to be a lot more profitable for him to charge you for time and reproduction than it does to charge you for time and throw in the copyright.
Nerd rage is the funniest rage.
If you want to keep your IP, don't go to a school
Being a digipen student myself, I have a unique perspective.
EVERY digipen student is well aware of the school's copyright policies. This happens well BEFORE any development on school games begin. As such, we know FULL well that any game or assignment we turn in is the full copyright of digipen.
HOWEVER, having discussed this at length with various professors (and heads of the game department), there are ways around this.
1) Any game you develop completely outside of digipen is yours free and clear. Provided that you did not use school resources (software from school counts as a resource as a the software has specific academic licenses tied with it).
2) Any game that you work on outside of school for another company is yours free and clear. BUT, most companies have you sign contracts signing over the copyrights to those games anyway.
I have worked on multiple titles while at digipen, and am working on something for myself. BUT, since none of these were for digipen - my professors tell me quite clearly that digipen has no claim.
Personally, I am quite miffed at the students who are bent out of shape over this policy. We have all signed the papers to attend school. We have all paid our tuition. We have all sat through the same lengthy lectures regarding digipen's right to copyright.
Think of it this way, if digipen has the right to tell you what game content can go in your game to be turned in, then of course they're going to make sure they have the right to see what happens with that game.
Unless you're an employee of the school, or use their equipment, you should own anything you do. Graduate students may be employees if they have an assistantship, but undergraduates usually are not.
I had some minor difficulties with Stanford over a similar issue in the mid-1980s. I was a Stanford student, wasn't using any Stanford equipment, and wasn't a Stanford employee. There was some huffing and puffing from the Stanford side, but they knew they had an unwinnable case. It worked out fine for me in the end. Stanford later changed their policy in that area, and I was told years later by a faculty member that I was partly responsible for that. The new policy is in some ways worse and in some ways better; Stanford wants a cut, but they'll help market the technology, and if they don't, the inventor gets it back. This is often a win for students. Stanford has very close connections with the Silicon Valley venture community and a track record in licensing technology. Stanford owns a piece of Sun, Cisco, Yahoo, and Google under this deal.
It's much worse if you're arguing over IP rights with some school that doesn't routinely do IP deals. The school administration is likely to be both overbearing and clueless.
What a waste. Go to a university, get a BS in Computer Science and make your own games.
And get whom to make the models, textures, maps, and audio? And then get whom to pitch the playable prototype to publishers?
You are going to a game school and making a game for that school. What do you expect?
At a game school, I would expect a game-oriented job fair, game development internships, and other ways of making contacts in the video game industry. The school where I earned a BS in computer science didn't have that.
Ok, so the school owns the copyright on that game, right? Ok, so how about they remake the game from scratch, with a new name, new artwork, new music, the works. The largest part of the initial work probably went towards things like planning and refining ideas. Now that they know what they want, it shouldn't be so hard to just remake it, just a bit differently and perhaps even better than before.
Companies make complete rip-offs of other games all the time, and no one gets sued for it, because the idea itself isn't copyrightable.
When on Slashdot, troll like Slashdot trolls troll.
Contrary to the popular belief, there indeed is no God.
Did you sign a contract? If no, the school doesn't own the copyright to anything you create in school, period. They may claim otherwise, of course, and they may try to bully you if you exert your rights, but don't let that fool you: unless you signed over your rights, you still have them.
was at digipen in vancouver early on.. i left because of moral and integrity issues.. lies.. from comair. he created a sick climate, exploiting peoples ambition and making like he is an ally. quite good preparation for the jobs i had @ ea and elsewhere in that regard. i experienced abuse similar to that scene in the matrix where neos mouth gets sealed in an office by smith. sounds like the same arm waving applies. any school that sandbags students sucks
... if a university does own the rights to your work, they could very simply disallow your contributions to be released under a given license (BSD in this case). ...
If the student re-develop the game from scratch for commercial sale, can copyright be circumvented?
No wonder the successful Web pioneers drop out of school! <g>
If it's a student project then you probably put, what, 2 days of effort into it? You're a geek with youth on your side, and you've probably written 100x as much code for your own amusement than you've written for a stupid assignment/competition.
Just recode it. You'll do it better the second time, anyway, and copyright doesn't cover ideas, just implementations.
How we know is more important than what we know.
At the Australian University I work for, and I believe it is the same for all, the students retain the IP for any creative work they produce. This applies to both undergrad and postgrad students, but interestingly, does NOT apply to staff. However, a recent law suit saw an Academic sue the Univeristy he worked for over a patent realting to a drug he created. The court found in his favour stating that acedmics are empoyed to conduct research, and not to invent. From the judgment "...a duty to research does not carry with it a duty to invent". http://www.managingip.com/Article/1922287/Australian-court-highlights-university-patent-dangers.html/
"They looked deep into my soul and assigned me a number based on the order in which I joined"
The institutions that I have attended and worked for clearly stated that the copyrights belong to the student. End of story.
Yet the university may have the right to prevent publication on other grounds. Even though the aforementioned universities said that the students own the rights to their own work, they also claimed that worked created using their computing facilities could only be used for the advancement of the university's mission. Those policies aren't there to force students to forefit their rights. They are there to prevent the abuse of limited resources. (And, as someone previously mentioned, the university may have contractual obligations through software licensing agreements.) So while the university's assertion does seem to be unreasonable in this context, it is quite probably reasonable under most circumstances.
If the students did, and can prove, that the game was entirely created with their own computing resources (i.e. they did not use school computers, or software that was licensed to them through the school), it is quite probable that the school wouldn't have a leg to stand on. Unfortunately, even if that was the case, it would be quite difficult to prove.
I'm a freshman at Digipen right now, and I see nothing wrong with the way they go about copyright. If you are using THEIR resources to make your game, then it feels fair that they hold the rights to your game. Not to mention, it keeps the students from getting sewed for trying to sell something that was made using software that was only licensed for educational use(which is the primary reason for this whole copyright thing that Digipen has).
If you really want to market your game, do what the Portal kids did. They made an amazing portal puzzle game as their Digipen final project, and then re-used the idea, with a new implementation and new code base, to make Portal.
Having been a Digipen student I have to say that the school is very demanding and the game classes take a tremendous effort to complete. Too many students don't know how to pace themselves to keep their academic classes balanced with their game class. There is a lot of pressure from your teammates to make a great game. If you added to that the temptation of fame and fortune I have no doubt the academic program at the school would collapse. I'm sure this is a big reason behind this policy at the school.
Not to mention that the last thing the school needs are student teams trying to figure out how to split profits from their game when they "hit it big". There are legal quagmires that most students don't realize they would be walking into. These projects are never done solo.
Not every student project can be the next Portal (which was a re-write of a DigiPen project taken up by Valve) but I'm sure there are a lot of students who are hoping that they can be. This policy is there to protect them from failing out of their academic classes and taking their teammates with them. I've seen this happen and I hope they understand that there is time after school for starting their game business.
The person you replied to made the perfectly valid point that not all schools require you to sign over your work. Most major research institutions only claim an interest in the research projects you work on (i.e., the ones where they provided the workstations and a research stipend), and don't claim an interest in your homework assignments, senior thesis, whatever.
Your argument that "but, but what if 'all relevant players in an industry have the same requirement'" is unfounded in reality. Please think before you type.
I'm in the film program at Fullsail, and I do know that anything you create their is yours (or anybody on your crew) to do whatever you want with - Sell it, show it, or whatever.
It probably works the same way in their game dev dept. as well.
Given the primary reason of any Educational establishment is to help its students develop the skills required for industry and to help their entrance into industry (in whatever field) they are not doing their job correctly by not helping him. Also who said he used the provided resources to actually create the game, not just what he learned in lectures, class, lab... Often work is done in my free time on my own computers here (I'm a computer science student).
"We are a school, not a production house, and therefore our goal is for the students to gain the knowledge and experience they need to be successful in the field. We may lose students based on our IP policy, but this is not as important to me as is maintaining the quality of the education.
"I am not saying that we will not change in the future," he adds. "But, in order to do that, we need to talk to the industry to see what they feel would be best. Our program advisory committee is made up of the best of the best companies in the world. So far," he says, "they are very happy with our policy."
what about a University wanting it's students to become successful by becoming their own entrepreneur's?? Fuck corporations and their link to U's for producing "good employees".
I'm not worried. My ISP provides me with a dynamic one anyway. I'll just end up getting a new one.