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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.'"
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.
Don't sign contracts like that.
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!!
There goes my karma... and the schools will start agreeing with Steve Ballmer too.
When you pay for someone to do work you, you do *not* necessarily get the IP rights to that work. A notorious example is wedding photography -- you're paying for the photographer's time and a set of prints, but you do not have duplication rights. Those belong to the photographer, because it's considered an artistic work, just as if you hired a famous artist to paint a scene.
You're correct, but the situation with the photographer is not analogous to the situation with a University.u When you hire a wedding photographer, the photographer creates the "IP" (the wedding photos). But in Gates82's post, when he "hires" a university, it is not the university creating the IP (a game in this topic, but could be most anything else), but him instead. There's nothing wrong with your post, but it doesn't contradict anything Gates82 wrote.
However, Gates82 also believes that if he pays all of his own tuition and fees then whatever he produces should be his. However, at a public university, some portion of every student's costs are subsidized by the state, so the state might have some interest in anything he produces even if he pays his own way.
- T
If you want to keep your IP, don't go to a school
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.
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.
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.
except that my schools have always REQUIRED people to do their own original work. Therefore the work should remain mine. I believe the schools opinion is that they are "directing" the work, so the work you do is "work for hire" and assigned to them. They are directing the work you do.. you wouldn't have done it without their input as an assignment. Frankly, it's a corporate-style power grab to prevent students from benefiting when corporations "donate" large amounts of money to "help" students. In the case of many of the IP agreements in place with industry, perhaps the tax exemptions should be taken away from large schools and corporate donations as the rules do not benefits students anymore.
yet schools can't manage to own the text books that professors write using student intern time.... Hummmm.
Exactly. In fact, to spite my college, I tend to release all papers to the public domain or a permissive license and then upload them to Archive.org or some such. I know for a fact that at my college (St. Petersburg College) all liberal arts students get to keep IP of their work. As a music major, this is very important to me. I feel that what you create at school is yours unless your college states explicitly otherwise in writing. It's not right to exploit students. Period.