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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.
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.
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.