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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.'"
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.
> Even if I use school resources to create the item (I'm paying for those services)
While I do agree with you, this point here is problematic. While you are paying for the resources, you are (almost certainly) paying for educationally licensed versions of those resources. In short, if you were to commercialize something that they could prove you created using such resources, you could be sued for breach of contract.
Further, you also neglect to consider private contributions to universities. These usually represent rather significant portions of the budget, and can exceed a billion dollars in the case of particularly prestigious schools. As a result, no school can be considered to be funded entirely by the students, meaning that the school's resources are not entirely payed for by students anyway.
That being said, unless you are being paid to be there, they almost certainly have no claim to any IP created by a student, regardless of whether it's on the student's or the "university's time" (as the latter is being paid for by the student). The only possible argument to the contrary is that the university views the potential IP produced by the a student as additional compensation for their educational services.
There are interesting questions here though, namely what exactly a student pays for as part of their education. Intriguingly, I would have to say that a student has more claim to work they do for class than that they do otherwise, as the former is obviously part of the services they are paying for. Any university assistance on the latter, however, could very well be regarded as additional, unrelated services (e.g. consulting a professor, using software, etc).
As a final note: I am unaware of any school even attempting to assert ownership of IP created by liberal arts students, such as creative writings or art portfolios, etc. There may well be some definitive precedent within that area.
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