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Universities Patenting More Student Ideas
theodp writes "Working as a NASA intern, grad student Erez Lieberman had a eureka moment, resulting in an algorithm that detects whether a person is standing correctly or is off balance. Unfortunately, MIT liked it so much they decided to patent it. Seeking permission to use his own idea for his iShoe startup, which develops products like insoles to address the problems of seniors, Lieberman was told no problem — as long as he promised a hefty royalty and forked over a $75,000 upfront payment. Whether or not students are aware of it, the NYTimes reports that most universities own inventions created by students that were developed using a 'significant' amount of schools resources. Colleges and universities once obtained fewer than 250 patents a year, but that was before the Bayh-Dole Act gave them ownership of inventions developed through federally financed research. Now they acquire about 3,000 a year, and in 2006 licensing fees and equity in spinoff companies totaled at least $45B — research powerhouses like Stanford and NYU pocketed $61M and $157M, respectively."
Perhaps a non-profit should step in or be formed to provide resources to students to develop their ideas, and only ask for the student to pay back expenses + 1-5% if their idea strikes gold. Perfect? Hardly. But it's a great starting point. You hear that Bill Gates/Warren Buffet? Fund this idea! Throw a cool mil into the pot to see where it goes. My price is a beer over lunch =)
The stupid exploit the smart.
The dangers of knowledge trigger emotional distress in human beings.
...I guess some inventive students are receiving more of an education than they bargained for. Shameful behavior from institutions which really ought to be setting a better example.
Caveat Utilitor
I believe the justification for patents is that it encourages innovation, allowing products to come to market that would otherwise never see the light of day. To be honest, I have always been pretty skeptical, but it seems particularly difficult to square such a claim when inventors are prevented from using their own inventions. If MIT wants to patent its students' work, it should at least exempt those who had the idea in the first place from paying royalties.
The university where I graduated from forced all students to sign an agreement that any work that you do while a student of the university, they hold all the copyrights.
I have come up with ideas and made many music recordings, all of which I have have zero right to exploit as I do not own the rights. It doesn't matter if the work was done at home or at a university campus.
"Whaddya mean they patented our Toga Party concept?"
Table-ized A.I.
Something's very wrong here. These universities do not exist for their own sake. They merely exist to generate both the next generation of scientiest and also the next generation of entrepeneurs that will run fortune 500 businesses based on the ideas developed during their studies.
The way it is now, they merely prohibit students from ever becoming self employed, provably providing the next generation of new firms that will run the country's economy.
If these are being funded by Federal dollars, than it should look carefully at how these are administered. In particular, part of the earnings should go back to the feds. But, also, I wonder wether the feds can say we allow the university TRUE LIMITED TIMES with these. The idea of patents and copyrights (as laid out by forefathers) was to give ppl LIMITED time to build businesses off these, make some money and then allow the idea to revert to the COMMONWEALTH. That is, into public space. Now, congress has changed it so that the patent is the money maker.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
http://http//www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/story.asp?storyCode=404351§ioncode=26
"They looked deep into my soul and assigned me a number based on the order in which I joined"
Funny, I thought the whole tuition thing was your payment for using their academic resources and facilities? Otherwise, shouldn't they be paying students for their development work?
Deltron 3030 - Virus (music video)
Ok, so this guy not only have to deal with the Universities for using idea which was originally his, but now have to deal with trademark infringement with Apple? Yeah good luck trying to keep your balance when you shoot yourself in the foot.
But jokes aside, aside from helping the disabled, maybe this technology can be used in the world of sports?
Until you're out of school.
This crap will hurt the schools in the long run. Instead of being able to pickup a patent here and there. People will work hard to keep their ideas secret until they are free and clear of the schools influence. And the schools get NOTHING.
Yet another case of excessive greed ruining something good.
Great work there.
Do undergrads in design classes sign an agreement over IP now? I know I had to sign one for graduate school, but I wasn't aware undergrads had to do it too. Since often times these design classes are required in order to get a degree, this would seem very heavy handed to me. Of course, making grad students sign over their inventions is coercive as well, since there really isn't any place you can go in the US these days that doesn't require you to sign such a thing, but Ph.D.'s are seen as being more optional in life. Luckily for me, the likelihood of a great, patentable invention coming out of my work is extremely low.
I guess the best strategy to follow if you want to avoid paying a fee to use your own invention would just be to publish your result right away before the tech transfer office gets word about its usefulness. Then go form your own company and "run like hell" to make sure you are the leader in the field before anyone else can catch up to you. The usefulness of patents in creating successful companies is often dubious anyway.
There is of course VERY simple solution - make sure your Professors/Academic Council don't really understand what you're doing... and don't release the "brilliant" parts of your solution(s).
Lets say you've come up with a brilliant way to perform Inventory/Order Management within an Information System... don't document the entire thing, put enough information in so they can see that it can (potentially) work, but the devil is (of course) in the detail... I did this one time when I didn't trust the person running the subject I was studying at the time (the individual also OBVIOUSLY didn't know his subject material and, in my opinion, had the ethical stance of a rat).
In any case, if your invention is innovative/worthwhile, you'll get to negotiate an agreement with the University should you continue developing it... remember though, give a VAGUE overview of the concept, and don't detail how it can be implemented to perform the function that you invisage it being used for UNTIL YOU'VE GOT THE SIGNED AGREEMENT/CONTRACT!!!
A Man's ethical behavior should be based effectually on sympathy, education, and social ties -- Albert Einstein
Aside from the obvious point-of-view that this is almost theft, doesn't this mean the University can afford to invest in more research and therefore invent more cool technologies?
At the University of Waterloo, the policy is that any student created IP is property of that student. Its awesome. I love it.
Obligatory blog plug: http://www.caseybanner.ca/
There is a simple solution here:
If you have a realy good idea that you intend to start a business with then patent it before you submit your work!
You would have to do it anyway
null
The correct procedure is to sit on all your ideas and only reveal them once you are out of university (pretend you developped them in the two months after you left universities).
If sued, in front of the judge, explain that during the time you were at university (if a grad) you were mostly used as low paid labor for boring and non innovative work like debugging other people code or correcting exams the professor was supposed to correct himself (varies according to university rules). And that you lacked the free time to innovate at that time.
Either that or have your mother patent them for you. Don't use your wife for that: too risky with divorce rates.
Now to those that think this is unethical: your employers have no loyalty for you ? Why should you have any for them? Loyalty is paid back with loyalty. Backstabbing is paid back with backstabbing.
look over any paperwork for any class/university before signing it. if there is anything about inventions, works of art, essays, etc becoming university property, refuse to sign until the contract is amended. if they will not do it, vote with your dollars and promise bad publicity (there's no need for libel or slander when the truth is this ugly).
ianal, but i would assume that a university claiming rights to someone's work without a written agreement would not be viewed too positively in any court.
Someone tell me again why exactly anyone thinks patents are a good idea? It becomes more and more obvious to me every day that they do NOT promote innovation, and probably do the exact opposite.
So, here we have yet more patents doing a bang-up job of protecting the rights and interests of the actual inventors, which we were indoctrinated to believe is the purpose of the patent system, eh? Do you suppose we were told a lie?
This is nothing new. Walt Disney was able to patent Mickey Mouse many decades ago even though the character was a blatant ripoff of a physical toy (which had already been trademarked or patented, can't recall which).
The patent system does nothing to protect the rights of actual inventors, nor does it encourage invention. NOT having the safety net of a patent is a much stronger motivation to keep inventing than having one.
When huge, already established corporate entities and institutions will have monopoly on making money, we will be thrown into another period of medieval dark ages.
Let's hope a revolution will take place before that.
When did humans lose out in significance in favour of corporations?
If you don't want the Uni to own your ideas, then don't use their resources to develop them. The same goes for business, if you work for a corporation and use their resources to develop an idea, then they own it.
You might not like it, but our society and legal system prefers those who take the most [financial] risk, not those who are the most creative.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
Universities don't hide this fact from students... when we start grad school we sign a very specific intellectual property agreement. Universities aren't stupid, they have legal departments or at least consultants. Keep in mind that we aren't *just* students, most grad student researchers are really paid employees who happen to do their work at a school instead of a private company, instead of a manager we have an adviser (professor), and we also sometimes take or TA for classes.
Just like with a regular job you are free to ask that this agreement is altered or even nullified, but that's up to you and your employer (the school). If you invent something unrelated to your job (your academic research), then of course you are free to do whatever you want with it. If you invent something directly related to your job and you want to go start a company with that invention, you might be in for a fight, just like you would be with a regular employer.
Universities and industry get used to it, and know if you do come up with something patentable, the golden rule is, DONT TELL ANYONE. Its not the person who thought of the idea, its the person or group who patents it. I bet most students even if they did come up with the idea have the resources to patent it anyway, so what then let someone else get a patent on it ? The world is not easy or fair nor should it be, get over it.
I don't know how it is now, but when I went to NYU for my Ph.D. studies there was nothing like this you had to sign. You retained copyright to anything you did, just like professors and tuition paying students did. It was University policy that they owned any patents they filed for on your behalf, but you would get 50% of the royalties. There was very little pressure to apply for patents on your inventions, those who took the University up on it's offer were dreaming of the royalties. Those who didn't were generally the pulled-up-themselves-up-by-the-bootstraps sort who felt that patenting their ideas was an ignoble act after their run of good luck in getting where they were (it takes more than just smarts).
I highly doubt MIT coerced this former graduate student into patenting his invention. He probably just got greedy and now the university is seeking a little cost recovery. The issues concerning whether it when it is good idea to patent your inventions have been well understood among engineering and science graduate students for about a decade now, so I'm fairly confident that he was well aware of them.
The 45-billion dollars in royalties must be the reason that tuition are going down.
We should be careful here. The system may be best left as is. The idea is that:
most universities own inventions created by students that were developed using a 'significant' amount of schools resources.
This is to protect universities against people taking 99% of the university's idea/invention, adding 1%, and then using the university's research to make money while the university keeps begging for donations. Some universities may be fine monetarily, but some need all the money they can get to keep up their standards.
Onto this case. Perhaps MIT & NASA already had the equipment and a similar algorithm that Lieberman simply added an elegant flourish to. If that's the case, he should get some joint arrangement going, but he shouldn't be allowed to pass it off as if he developed the entire thing himself. But what it actually sounds more like, is they both sides significantly contributed, which makes things difficult.
He can try to prove that the university's contribution to the project was "insignificant", but that's going to be a hard sell. If I were him, I'd see what friends I still have in the MIT bureaucracy, see what they can do, and then (while trying to not to ostrichsize them) try to get as much media attention as possible so that MIT can make a good-will announcement that they're giving him the rights.
I'm actually less familiar with what the rules are for my work and copyrights. I was referring to patents, from which, as you correctly point out, the inventor (the grad student in this case) gets a portion of any royalties. I believe it is typically closer to 30 or 35 percent rather than 50, since the department and the primary investigator often get a slice too. In any case, you don't retain control over the patent, in that the school can decide who they want to sell/lease it to. If they think the return will be better by going with another company rather than the one you want to set up, you can't really do anything about it.
But if your invention wasn't going to compete in an industry with high barriers to entry or large established players, is a patent really that useful? Especially if its existence is going to cost your fledgling company lots of money? The answer may be yes or it may be no. It really depends. But there are _lots_ of successful companies that started without patents.
Why the fuck are they charging so much to study there?
It was University policy that they owned any patents they filed for on your behalf, but you would get 50% of the royalties.
Given the cost of registering then protecting your patent in the courts would be prohibitive to all and near impossible for most ordinary salary earners (let alone students on their student grants!), that's actually quite a sound deal they're offering.
Let's keep a few things in mind:
1. This was "a technology he created as an intern at NASA in the summer of 2007." It's not like he was an undergraduate sitting in a classroom -- he was working for NASA when he made the invention.
2. "The iShoe researchers used some of their own work and previous NASA data ," the latter presumably taken with "an expensive device about the size of a phone booth" in the creation of their invention. So NASA's data (and presumably equipment) were needed to produce the invention.
3. While an intern, Lieberman was also a federally-funded (i.e., taxpayer-supported) graduate student, receiving money from both the National Science Foundation and Department of Defense, through his university, for his research. Like many (perhaps substantially all) graduate researchers in US universities, he was being paid by his university to do research. The fact that the research was being conducted at NASA doesn't change the fact that Lieberman was on the university payroll at the time the invention was made. Welcome to internships.
4. His company has also filed for federal funding to develop the idea for market and, "[o]nce funding is obtained, the iShoe could be for sale in 18 months, Lieberman said." So he's still using taxpayer money to develop the invention for market.
5. We don't know what the "hefty royalty" is (unless I missed it, it's not in any of the linked articles), but $75,000 is peanuts. "The iShoe has a way to go to reach the market [...] Lieberman estimates $1 million is needed for a broad clinical trial, and $3 million to $4 million to bring the insole to market." As a startup, his monthly burn rate will be much more than $75,000.
Frankly, I'm fine with institutions receiving a financial return on the work of their paid employees -- especially if taxpayers are ultimately footing the bill. In fact, I would argue that Mr. Lieberman is getting a sweetheart deal; I think once he gets into industry himself he'll find that the commercial sector typically requires employees to assign all rights to any future inventions (at least, in the company's field of interest) to their employer starting on Day 1, usually with trivial or no compensation.
It will be interesting to see what intellectual property policy the new iShoe company establishes for its own employees. As CEO, will Lieberman let his iShoe researchers invent and patent without expecting that those inventions will belong to iShoe?
"Property" addles the brain. Also, universities don't see their mission as helping the economy, so acts on their part which harm the formation of wealth are fine, as long as their research is protected.
Government, however, should know better. But there, lawyers (such as most politicians) make the decisions, and law is centred around property (well, '9/10'ths of it is). Lawyers are often constitutionally incapable of comprehending how certain forms of "intellectual property" are counterproductive. Besides, politicians frequently confuse economics and finance, and are under constant pressure to reduce costs, rather than maximise productivity.
Additionally, in terms of American politics, universities are expected to do what they can with their own "assets" according to industry norms; to do otherwise would seem "socialist". Ironically, this attitude results in a branch of the state owning wealth-creating ideas and effectively taxing them twice (once to use the idea, once with the profits made from the idea).
This attitude on the part of Government isn't exclusive to the US. In my home city of Cambridge, UK, the university fought Government pressure to claim patent rights over student and staff discoveries. Here, ownership of one's ideas has had a long history. In the end some compromise (generous licence terms) was found, but the Government truly do not understand the harm that it is causing - ultimately to its own tax revenue.
Wikileaks, no DNS
What else is new?
If you have an idea and that idea was 100% yours, then:
1. Don't do a paper with it;
2. Don't present it to professors;
3. Don't do anything with it BEFORE you end your scholarship.
AFTER you end your student days, implement and patent it.
When I worked for [big industrial gas outfit, think major cryogenics] the company contributed to universities in order to have access to Ph.D research. Some of it was good, but the eggheads often "didn't know" (cough-cough) how to adapt/simplify things down to a useful industrial level. The really high-level results stuff was undoubtedly cherry-picked and not exposed to engineering-level people like myself. Those bastards! They should have told me everything!
Ignoring the issue of taking the patent away from the creator, if it's funded by taxpayer dollars, shouldn't the taxpayer retain an interest? The legislation should give the government the patent, not the university.
Even if they had a similar algorithm, it was still either created by a student or staff member. If it's staff than it's rightful the college's property but if it's a student's I think there is a contradiction. The student is paying to use college resources so doesn't that fall under the copyright ownership of "for hire" works so that the student would actually have a claim to the work?
1. NEVER EVER SHARE AN ORIGINAL IDEA IN CLASS OR IN A PAPER
It will be patented, copyrighted and sold by the university. Additionally, you will never be able to use it again without paying.
2. NEVER EVER USE UNIVERSITY COMPUTERS FOR DEVELOPING A BUSINESS
If you are successful, one day the University will come looking to extort money from you because they have one email where you outlined the idea.
3. USE YOUR OWN COMPUTERS AND BRING YOUR OWN NETWORK.
Don't use the University's high speed. For lots of reasons. Starting with the ease with which universities will give third parties like the RIAA information. Moving on to intellectual property rights. Moving on to using your activities against you in academic disputes. You just can't trust them, and the only way to be sure you own your work is to own the computer and network. In other words, get a 3G card.
-- $G
Right. Just like this.
If you want your life to be different, live it differently.
It is a sad day when our universities have slipped to an all new low. We pay lots of money for our education and now the very bastian of free thinking and free ideas does such underhanded things as patent someone else's work. Never mind that it might be legal, it certainly is unethical and immoral. The only way this would be remotely ethical is if the student was well compensated for his work. I'll go out on a limb and say most are not "well-compensated." If universities behave like this, I guess that you could justify cheating on an exam because "stealing" a student's work is actually far worse an ethical transgression. If you come up with a fantastic, new, and patentable idea, don't share it! It looks like fundamental human greed plays a large part.
...find companies such as MS behind universities going this direction.
The who gets first crack at profiting from research done at universities.
In exchange the companies sponsor such programs.
Here is an example
Note that it is abusive and contradicts the whole purpose of the patent system. Patents are intended, as is copyrights, to provide incentive for the creators of the works via granting a limited monopoly so to profit from their works, to do such works.
Additionally software is not of patentable such matter, a provable matter. (software patents are frauds).
The word you're looking for is "ostracize," not "ostrichsize." Though turning university bureaucrats into ostriches would be highly amusing.
The results of federally financed research should be in the public domain, not in the patent holdings of universities.
There is no "-1 offended" or "-1 you don't agree with me" mod options for a reason.
Actually, if he was working as an intern at NASA, there is a significant probability that the US Government owns the patent. The conditions of federal employment (I am a senior scientist with the government) are that work developed on their dime is their IP.
MIT might actually be at risk on this one...
...is because it shows up on their balance sheets. Investors like it because instead of R&D being a cost to a company, it now becomes a profit center because R&D creates "IP", much like a shovel and pick create/discover "minerals" that can be sold or exploited.
Never mind that IP is nothing like actual property; they'll keep passing more laws to make an idea seem more like a thing for investment purposes.
Plus, then IP shows up in GDP, can be bought and sold, and "creates wealth". Never mind that it's the equivalent of eating your seed corn to lock away knowlege, the human condition always values being satisfied now versus building for the future.
You were mistaken. Which is odd, since memory shouldn't be a problem for you
Arguing that the university is owed a debt for providing resources to students, is like arguing that the owner of Menlo Park should reap a percentage of Edison's rewards, even though rent was paid for those labs.
I could see if the arrangement wasn't one of default methodology. The university establishes a de facto toe-hold over patents, and gets paid for it. But that kind of exploitation is against the morality of education and must be rejected by educators. Or we have nothing but a society of pyramid schemers.
The dangers of knowledge trigger emotional distress in human beings.
At my university, the administration makes it very clear that any IP rights for student inventions due to a classroom assignment belong to the student. A purely academic "student", by definition, is not an employee of the university.
A graduate research assistant is another matter entirely. A GRA is an employee of the university, paid by the university, and subject to the same IP regulations as the faculty and staff. In that respect my university is, in my opinion, extremely generous compared to private companies, as it allows faculty to have joint ownership of the IP, to develop as they see fit as long as the university receives a reasonable royalty. Considering the millions of dollars worth of capital equipment the university has placed at my disposal, I consider that quite a bargain.
Mr. Leiberman will never get a better deal for an idea he developed on someone else's dime for as long as he lives. If he can't afford the $75K upfront fee, he should talk to the MIT IP lawyers and see if he can negotiate a reduction in return for a slightly higher royalty rate. He might be surprised how willing they are to work with him.
First, please look at 2 posts below this, called: "I'm going to be unpopular here, but...". It points out many things including that Lieberman was working for NASA and was being paid by his university to do research.
However, the question is an interesting one (although it doesn't pertain to this situation).
I guess it could be oversimplified like this: I pay you to teach me how to build computers. You go out and buy $2,000 worth of parts and show me how to build it. What I purchased was the education, which you gave. I can't just walk away with the computer I built. Because it's made up of your resources.
So the question with universities is, "what exactly are we paying for?" We can't use their resources indiscriminately. We can't sell pieces of their buildings for example. Students pay to use resources in as much as it provides an education. Unless given permission, they're usually not allowed to freely use resources outside of that scope.
You nailed the post I was thinking, so I'll try a followup. Since the RIAA has told us how much IP is worth, that makes the student's contribution about a million dollars right?
What happens if you take a semester off?
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
It was similar for me with my engineering senior design project at University of Wisconsin-Madison. Although I didn't have any brilliant ideas, at least one patent is coming from other groups in my class. I didn't realize it at the time that I was designing my project, but owning the rights to your own invention is a big deal for an undergraduate design project. I've never worked harder in my life, and it would have been very frustrating to have the university tell me that I could not patent my design should I have felt that my design was patentable.
The thing that really gets me is that universities also patent work that is supported with public funds. So you pay your taxes, the government gives a chunk to the NSF, the NSF gives you a grant, you invent something with that money, then the university lays claim on it. That invention rightfully belongs to the public. I guess the feds allow this under the mistaken belief that "without a patent no innovation would happen".
When I wrote grants to the NSF, I always put a clause in there that said I would release all software I develop for the grant under an open source license in order to share the discovery. It happened that I worked at William and Mary which had a pretty reasonable approach to IP, but places like the University of Virginia have patent foundations and scholars have an obligation to disclose patentable discoveries. I would have loved to see a judge untangle the knot of IP that was developed under the promise of open source distribution versus the claim the university makes on it.
Here's the thing: I don't see how this can be justified - if the school is allowing the student to study and attend for free, than it may make some sense that the school would have options over any intellectual property - however, most people pay for their university via student loans, family money, third party scholarships, or actually working their way through school.
Given that this is the case, why should the institution have this right?
Your post is ridonkulious. It assumes that students have one great idea and that's it.
That's false on two fronts: 1) I hope they have more than one and 2) ideas without execution ain't worth crap.
Keep in mind that in many universities graduate students *are* employees. At least, this was the argument made by the unionization efforts that have resulted in graduate student unions.
And unions aside, many graduate students - especially at the doctoral candidate level - are paid a stipend by the university rather than paying the university.
So really, there's nothing wrong with universities patenting the work of student employees as well as faculty or any other sort of employee using their facilities.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Hahaha!
Oh well... -1 for me and my spellcheck =p
...That is called Intellectual Property.
In a world where every few years the number of transistors on a microchip doubles, how can you justify a 20 year patent time, much less a ~140 year copyright time?
Aug. 13, 1813: Thomas Jefferson, letter to Isaac McPherson
It is agreed by those who have seriously considered the subject, that no individual has, of natural right, a separate property in an acre of land, for instance. By an universal law, indeed, whatever, whether fixed or movable, belongs to all men equally and in common, is the property for the moment of him who occupies it; but when he relinquishes the occupation, the property goes with it. Stable ownership is the gift of social law, and is given late in the progress of society. It would be curious then, if an idea, the fugitive fermentation of an individual brain, could, of natural right, be claimed in exclusive and stable property.
If nature has made any one thing less susceptible than all others of exclusive property, it is the action of the thinking power called an idea, which an individual may exclusively possess as long as he keeps it to himself; but the moment it is divulged, it forces itself into the possession of every one, and the receiver cannot dispossess himself of it. Its peculiar character, too, is that no one possesses the less, because every other possesses the whole of it. He who receives an idea from me, receives instruction himself without lessening mine; as he who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me.
That ideas should freely spread from one to another over the globe, for the moral and mutual instruction of man, and improvement of his condition, seems to have been peculiarly and benevolently designed by nature, when she made them, like fire, expansible over all space, without lessening their density in any point, and like the air in which we breathe, move, and have our physical being, incapable of confinement or exclusive appropriation.
Inventions then cannot, in nature, be a subject of property.
Society may give an exclusive right to the profits arising from them, as an encouragement to men to pursue ideas which may produce utility, but this may or may not be done, according to the will and convenience of the society, without claim or complaint from any body.
Accordingly, it is a fact, as far as I am informed, that England was, until we copied her, the only country on earth which ever, by a general law, gave a legal right to the exclusive use of an idea. In some other countries it is sometimes done, in a great case, and by a special and personal act, but, generally speaking, other nations have thought that these monopolies produce more embarrassment than advantage to society; and it may be observed that the nations which refuse monopolies of invention, are as fruitful as England in new and useful devices.
Responses to this item present a very negative view of Universities. My own does not own student work by default but, if developed with Faculty or using university equipment, will ask students to assign their rights. This is not a bad thing, on the contrary. I usually recommend it to my students! The University pays for securing protection, as appropriate, and gives professional advice. It funds proof of concept development. It provides training and support for student entrepreneurs, including incubating start-ups. It lends a powerful brand to licensing deals. The University has an advantageous profit sharing deal and does not take a large slice of equity from start-ups. Holding the IP, if an acquirer goes broke the University can still help the student to get the IP exploited.
There was a time when states effectively funded universities. Now that they don't (with our permission), and they're forced to play games with intellectual property and patents, who are we to complain?
Call your fucking legislators and have them pony up for your schools.
The school has no right to anyone's ideas.
Especially if the student is paying to go to the school. Dont these schools get tax breaks and other financial support from the government? What gives them the right to just own your thoughts?
I guess the lesson of the day is, progress is bad and keep your mouth shut kids. Dont invent anything. Dont contribute anything because in the end your contributions arent respected or protected unless you you go down that heartless road of "business as usual". Surround yourself with lawyers, become a legalese heart congestion like the rest of these greedy fucks who would rather own your ideas, than facilitate knowledge and learning.
Frankly its disturbing.
This seems to be a result of the Bayh-Dole act. While it's aim seems to have been to allow the government to get something back on money it may have invested it has turned into theft of ideas. This is clearly no different than a professor putting his/her name on work done by a student. While most of the things the universities do with the patents are worthwhile it does not excuse stealing someone else work. The universities seem to have forgotten that the ethics you live by affect where you and those you teach end up. Looking at what they are doing and teaching it's clear to anyone with the brains these students have demonstrated that they should ignore their smarts and become bankers (who else has a license to steal all the money they can get their hands on and a government bailout waiting when they mess up. )
Much (in some cases most) of the people working for a university are administrators and staff. Staff for the most part are pretty good, but administrators (who make this kind of rule) are pretty stupid indeed (often having degrees in such intellectual fields as "bureaucracy" and "paperwork generation". Of course, recognizing this, they're usually paid quite well - in some universities you can recognize the admin buildings by the quality and newness of the cars parked nearby.
Hot damn, I've even been on Slashdot for a couple years now and I didn't see this one coming!
"So the price of your grant is we get your IP" - beautiful. I was just defending education against some standard trolling, except this is real. Yuk.
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
In the olden days a university would hopefully provide a good education for a reasonable price. The newly minted alumnus would go on to fame and fortune. The university would then suck up to you and ask for donations. A generous alum would then spring for a new building, new lab, scholarships, because they had fond memories of partying and meeting their mate. The new university grabs all of your money and your future earning potential up front because they know your fond memories will be of parking tickets, car towing, crackdowns on partying, and forced re-education seminars in your dorm.
Except they have a weird squeeze play going on.
1. It's hard for the mind to reach its absolute top limits if part of it is busy playing an IP metagame. There's some unknown amount of damage to the student here.
2. The point of a classical Masters or Doctorate degree is to push the boundaries to achieve new results. So if you're saving your big ace in the hole it's the Elephant In The Room problem.
(Degree committee) "This paper is kinda neat, but there's clearly something not stated... deny the degree. The student is hosed, so he has no choice but to tell us."
Except weird super-high end Physical/Biosciences tests, and maybe a portion of CompSci, "education" consists of books plus 42 lectures plus a "sorta-reliable" proof to employers that you learned a little. We all know the soft degrees subsidize the scary equipment. We know Paper Publishing is a racket.
But the IP ideas can be worth millions. With that last fragment in the equation, it just barely might NOT be worth going to a "top" university, and instead fish out a semi-obscure one that just happens to have beautifully liberal IP policies. When it comes to the usual boring interview question for resumes "Gee, why didn't you go to Harvard?" The answer is "Because I like owning MY business thank you."
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
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In theory, patents are not so bad. They are a good way to encourage companies to invest time and money in research that costs a lot of money.
Farmaceuticals is a good example. In that field it takes more than a 'moment of briliance' to come up with a new drug. It takes years of hard work, lots of resources and tests and therefor a large investment to come up with a great new drug. Being able to patent such work will allow the company to reap the benefits of their labor, share the outcome with the world and move on into the next R&D project.
Things are different in the software world. I can think of a new algorithm tonight, without any effort or any risk of failure. So can you. If it's new and revolutionary, then great!
But why should the rest of the world be prevented from using 'your' idea, just because you thought of it first? I can think of it next without even knowing you exist. Why should I be prevented from using my own brain? That's what is wrong with software patents, the fact that thoughts and ideas are being claimed when everyone has a brain designed to produced them. There is no benefit to society. That's why software patents are bad.
But again, patents per se are not a bad thing, as long as they are applied to a field where it takes a real effort to invent something.
To Terminate, or not to Terminate, that's the question - SCSIROB
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How about the first-to-invent vs first-to-file in USPTO? It's written there just to look pretty? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_to_file_and_first_to_invent Or is it the kind of situation when the small entity has to fall back on their rights due litigation costs related to take it to court? Don't really think so, since is as simple as have a documented evidence one party came up with the idea before the other.
The answer is "Because I like owning MY business thank you."
Corporate HR droid: "Well, it just so happens we like owning your business as well. Don't call us, we'll call you."
If I have been able to see further than others, it is because I bought a pair of binoculars.
Drug and genetic companies set up R&D as an investment precisely because they expect patents and IP to come of it. They've shown the rest of the investment community the way to make money is to get out there, find something, write a general patent and then sue everybody else to oblivion.
And your assertion about IP actually helping innovation is the theory which has been disproved over the past 10 years. The biggest innovations in the last 25 years have not come about as a result of IP and IP protection, rather they've come about because people share their knowledge.
You fail at trying to brainwash people. You're probably an awful lawyer, too.
One of the goals of Reaganomics: treating tertiary education like a business instead of part of the commons.
Education isn't "free" anymore so why should knowledge be? And, honestly, under that ideology universities just have to survive and a lot of evils are spawned as a result.
Maybe I'm just completely insane, but shouldn't patents resulting from federally-financed research fall immediately into public domain so every taxpayer can take advantage of the fruits of their taxes?
Or better yet, shouldn't the federal funding be yanked and returned back to taxpayers since private ownership of those patents should be paid for by the private institutions?
The Christian Right is Neither (Christian nor right). See: Matthew 23, Matthew 25, Ezekiel 16:48-50
I always found that the best lectures and discussions were the ones where, having been introduced to a new idea, people started coming up with possible applications for it, or suggesting modifications that might give better results. Okay, most of them were crap, for we were lowly undergrads. But apparently, what we should have been doing, instead of blurting out things like, "Could this technique be used to clean up the audio in sound files?" and having the lecturer explain why that probably wasn't workable, we should have just written a quick "PATENT THIS" next to every dumb idea, then wait until we graduated to find out whether it was a good idea.
Imagine taking this attitude into your university-sponsored research projects. Every time you had a radical insight into why your team's approach wasn't working, you wouldn't send the team an e-mail. You'd document it in your personal files, wait for the project to crash and burn, then follow up after you graduated. Presumably, everyone else would be doing the same.
Then, once you became a professor, rather than telling your students, "Wow, that's an interesting approach, and I strongly encourage you to investigate it," you patiently explain to the student why it's a stupid idea, and he never would have suggested it if he really understood the coursework. If you're worth your professorial stipend, you should be able to come up with enough windbaggery to make it stick, and leave the student demoralized. Then, write a quick "PATENT THIS" in your notes.
If the student continues coming up with good ideas, convince him to drop out and join your idea lab, where you've already got a dozen bright, eager young folks slaving away, coming up with patents and products. It's not as though the Uni has a lot of specialized CS gear that you need to research things properly. You'd arrange your business relationship with these dropouts in whatever way gave it a veneer of legality.
To me, this sorry state of affairs seems like the logical result of a system where students are locked out of the profits generated by their own ideas. The university in this story ought to grant this student a license to his own invention, for $1.
You want the truthiness? You can't handle the truthiness!
I don't normally jump on spelling and grammar mistakes, especially in a post that's fairly well thought-out (sadly, not the norm around here) but I really think that "ostrichsize" is my favorite new verb of the year. Careful - don't make a big bird out of em!
I just about died laughing when I read it. Just so that my post has something the tiniest bit constructive in it, the word you meant was ostracize. Thanks, though, for the laugh. :)
I believe in the end this practice will drive great ideas out of the Universities. Personally, I would rather work on developing an idea at home rather than pursue it though a graduate degree for this very reason.
Schools are allowed to make all kinds of money licensing their sports images to videogame makers while students are the players making the name for the teams. But heaven forbid the players get any of that money. All this is doing is continuing the trend. Let's take advantage of the talent we've got but not give them the benefits derived from their work. In fact, let's charge them for the work they did.
If we don't protect the freedom of speech how will we know who the assholes are?
What the heck??????? If they're making so much money off these patents, what the heck are they charging students tuition for? Any student who's idea is taken by the university should be recompensed at the very least... with a full RETROACTIVE scholarship (i.e., including a refund of all expenses paid to date.) In the end the university will still probably end up making out like a bandit.
That is all you need to read. He has no right here. Everything belongs to NASA.
The parent poster contained no reference to "evil capitalists".
In fact, you can make a good case that getting a state-sponsored monopoly on knowledge (a.k.a. patents) is anti-capitalist.
Guys, please get it straight. I know how this works in a company (as I have 4 patents in my name) and I assume, it would work similar with Universities also (reasons below).
First of all, with patents you have an ASSIGNEE as well as INVENTOR. The Company you work for by consent decree, owns all your intellectual property (in almost all cases), so anything you invent and file for patent while working with a company, you are the Inventor, but Company is the ASSIGNEE, it gets the right to use it/productize it and sue another.
If you don't want that, quit the company and file it with you as the ASSIGNEE and INVENTOR.
Most people wont do that, because Inventions are incremental additions over existing features, companies generally have pools of patents to protect itself from infringement accusations.
This works out for Individual's also because they get the Recognition, Money and they realize that their feature wont make a startup by itself. (If it does make and you have courage to do it, then as I said, an employee should quit and go for it all alone).
How is it expected to work different with Univerisity?
Both ASSIGNEE and INVENTOR be Student itself?
Well consider the case, student graduates and remembers his university using the software, which he owns (ASSIGNEE) patent and finds that its a 'teaser-time'. You wont need much imagination to come up with the things can do to earn money.
When at University and while working as student, I think it is a safe measure to either.
a) Student(s) - Inventor(s) and Univ - ASSIGNEE
b) Student(s) - Inventor(s) and Student(s) and Univ - ASSIGNEE.
I personally prefer option b) and I think this is what the articles and comment wish to suggest as how things should be.
Senthil
You've nailed it. This is the problem with IP. One the one hand, creativity and innovation are always the result of collaboration between large numbers of people (much of it informal, unconscious, or indirect). On the other, IP allocates exclusive rights to an individual or organization. Invariably, many or most of the contributors are excluded while the IP owner free-rides on their work. Furthermore, because ownership ends up being held by many hands, future work is often forstalled. It runs into the tragedy of the anticommons: all owners must give their permission, and each owner is inclined to overvalue their contribution - not surprising, given that the system has already overvalued it by giving ownership to more than they produced.
Why? As lawyer James Boyle so eloquently details in his book Shamans, Software & Spleens, the legal system continues to make counterproductive rulings precisely because of the romantic myth of the lone inventor or author who has that Eureka! moment and creates something new out of thin air. The illusion you dismiss is a core foundation of the system as it stands (for copyright too, if you look back at the development of the concept of authorship, which is quite recent historically).
Let me make it clear what I have said and what I have not said (not necessarily for you, but people will make assumptions): I am not making a claim about the ideal outcome in this case. Neither am I proposing to abolish patents or IP - something I could not do without weighing their costs against their benefits. My beef is with your arguments.
The US has many universities that are private and many that are government-run. But in either case, the university needs money to operate, and even if they're getting some of it from the government as well as from students, they always need more money than they're getting. Socializing education doesn't change that (or if you think it does, ask your professors if they'd like a larger budget and higher salaries...)
Personally, I think that any government-funded research results ought to belong to the public - and by that, I mean they should be Free, not that the government should own patents on them. Privately run universities in the US often get lots of government funding for research, through the National Science Foundation and other sources, though they also get funded by tuition and alumni gifts and paid by corporations to do research, but even there, I think that part of the deal that the universities offer to corporations should be that the results are public.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
and it's exactly this kind of behvoir that will kill Open Source and the sharing of idea's.
The Supposed Purpose of Higher Education is the Free Sharing of Idea's to stimulate the development of further knowledge yet by taking this route, the schools are going to kill off any chance of recruiting the best grade of students once they begin to realize they can't make any money from their idea's.
Mod me up/Mod me down: I wont frown as I've no crown
Some individuals may choose to define it that way, however the ONLY existing "objective" measure of intelligence (about which experts can agree, anyway) with any degree of repeatability is the IQ test, which does not test "adaptability" at all.
While the argument that they should has merit, your statement is simply false.
In fairness it should be said that the things tested by standardized IQ tests may have some predictive value for adaptability, but that is a different matter.
At work my employers pay me to come up with ideas for them and whilst I was a student the government/university were doing just the same. If you've been supported by somebody during your development, then you owe them (what exactly is a more vague area).
Personally I'm all for these incubator/spinoffs, as they have many advantages:
Top academics don't have to choose between research or decent financial income - they can have both. It's not perfect, but I was always suspicious of the great minds who'd never actually managed to ever join the real world. They just remained students for ever.
Great work placement opportunities. For a chunk of a degree and majority of a Masters/Doctorate, you need to get yourself in a lab. Most of what's been done within a university is.. well uninspiring. Some professor had an idea 10 years ago and he's hellbent on fiddling with it. Nobody else cares, he gets his funding... but well you're unlikely to mind much use for the topic after you've finished. Work for a spinnoff/incubator and it's an exciting field. Real money from real people has decreed you're in that lab. When you've finished you know you've learnt something that other people care about and there's likely to be a job in it (if you're not useless you'll probably have been offered one at the startup).
This is a good example of a law that was intended to fix something, that instead created a monster. It has caused far too much of an unhealthy relationship between corporatism and higher education. It is also grossly unfair to students AND the public, because other parties, often private (and who were not directly involved in the research, much less responsible for the ideas) profit from work that was paid for by the public.
Bayh-Dole is an abomination that needs to die. So let's all get our torches, and storm the castle.
"It's pronounced 'Frahn-ken-steen'!!!" - Gene Wilder
This is one of the many reasons I've opted out of going back to school and have chosen to study on my own. This whole system has become antagonistic to the individual. It's already bad enough when you're in the work place that you have to be careful what ideas you talk about(those of you out there who are thinkers know what I mean), now that same paranoia is being encouraged in school. I guess on the bright side, it is a paranoia you will need to keep from getting hosed in the private sector. Hardly a bright side though.
I understand everyone who argues that people sign papers and that they should know, but I have to wonder if those same people have ever thought carefully about what overall effect this is beginning to have on the advancement of our technology. Not just that, but the detrimental effects these things have in our work and school cultures, and our over all culture.
Do we really want a society where the thinker has to be careful what they think and where? Should we let the real innovators feel as if they are prey in a wilderness full of wolves in the name of satisfying the monetary objectives of institutions? Institutions whose goals should be to teach individuals to fearlessly discuss, pursue, and expand on their ideas with their fellow thinkers, rather than teaching them that it is best not to deviate from the coursework lest they have a good and innovative idea stolen by the institution?
The stupid exploit the smart.
No, the "smart" businessman exploits the naive scientist. This is one of the reasons that, were I ever likely to invent something which was patentable, I'd find a businessman I'd trust to figure out how to take advantage of it. It requires a very different skill set from science.
after all expenses; 50% of royalties would most likely be beyond "sound", it'd be insanely stupid for the university -- there are enormous sunk costs before even a single dime of royalty is generated
yeahhhh, there's nothing for spawning ingenuity like not letting someone enjoy the fruits of their labor!
Students pay the universities hefty sums to be able to use that equipment. This makes no sense at all to me.
If you do come up with a brilliant idea while attending one of these schools, couldn't you just withdraw and keep everything for yourself? How would the school know when you came up with said ideas?
Assume a study which is 100% funded by the Feds to the tune of 2 million a year for 5 years for a total of 10 million during the life of the study. During the study there are 6 patents filed and granted.
Proposal:
1. The patents be held by the Feds, the university and the team performing the study.
2. All licensing money is distributed as follows:
a. 100% to the feds until 150% of the study costs have been paid. In this case, 15 million. When the money has been repaid, the Feds are removed from any further distribution and their portion of the patent is assigned back to the university and the study team.
b. For the next 5 years, distribution is 75% to the university and 25% to the study team.
c. After 5 years, distribution is 50/50 between the university and the study team.
Results:
1. If done properly, money will be available for research and will actually help to fund new research (The 150% payback) without using taxpayer money.
2. Universities have an incentive to do more research.
3. The brains behind the research (study team) are also compensated and rewarded for their hard work and inspirations.
With universities demanding more and more in tuition and tax funding, any IP that they obtain or create should be public domain just as with anything the government creates.
Patenting student ideas and then profiting off them is wrong. At most, a university should get a royalty free license IF the student patents one of his or her own ideas.
All this is going to do is encourage brilliant students to CONCEAL any marketable ideas they come up with while in school and thus is actually counter productive. I know that if I were in the same situation, I'd keep such an idea to myself and then "discover" it after I graduated.
No public funding for universities that register patents for profit instead of public domain. Let them choose one or the other.
Corporatism != Free Market
but couldn't tuition and student fees be considered payment for renting university equipment/resources?
The GEEK shall inherit the earth...
It seems like every day we find a new way to stifle creativity and create stupider, dependent people. If this country is going to survive we need to be breaking down the barriers that discourage people's creativity and resourcefulness not kill it!
Si vis pacem, para bellum! For evil to succeed good men need only do nothing!
Sooner or later University student councils are going to tell students not to "finish their research within the University". If I knew the University was going to patent one of my ideas with no recompense for my time you can guarantee if I had an eureka moment I would pack my bags and open my own home lab at that point. Im starting now hear reports of a massive lack of information flowing between students/teachers/Universities because everyone is chasing the magic $$. This as you can imagine is doing detrimental damage to University research as the same research is being repeated (and the tax payer paying for it multiple times) and little if any of the resulting information is being shared. Its a sad day when research information within Universities becomes a guarded commodity because this is totally against all previous policies of sharing information for the betterment of all.
In a Texas community college, a summer photography class for fun, I gained the knowledge that every photo taken for any assignment (I had about 1000 over two months) were the complete property of the school.
At my university, we are engaged in a senior design class that is year long. However, over the years that this course is mandated, the outside clients we are suppose to help are never fully satisfied due to the fact that our university owns the student work and summarily no business venture can come about from it in order to help serve the consumers at large...
So, in light of this, many of these ideas are done at most "decently" and with no care... and for the students with ideas for business and patenting who lack the available resources to start things on a whim; nothing is accomplished.
There are ways to get around these impediments without withdrawing from school however; but it involves having some outside counsel and some money sadly.
Once again, the great American past time of sapping!
against the constitution.
All federally funded research belongs TO THE PEOPLE.
If the student is a citizen, and the research is not covered under some form of secrets act, the university shouldn't be allowed to try to charge him, specially since he developed it.
MSBPodcast.com The opinions expressed here are my own. If you don't like 'em... Think up your own stuff.
When I went to college, I paid fees for the use of university resources. (computer, physics, chem labs) In fact, I was forced to pay for resources I never used like the buses, gym, pools and a mess of other things that were over booked and run down.
Publish your idea before you submit a patent disclosure. It's no longer patentable as it's in the public domain and therefore prior art. As the world's leading expert in the idea, you have a couple of options: 1) cash in on the consulting opportunities or 2) start up a business in that field, and patent the NEXT idea you have.
This is why me and some others are forming research lab co-ops on the outskirts of university centers. Whatever we can do off-campus, we do. There will be chapters or associates or whatever starting up around the world, but first lab will be in Albany, NY, aimed at SUNY Albany, Union, and RPI students. We'd like to get ones started in other areas like Cambridge/Boston but the cost of even the most raw floor space is expensive. If you're interested in one in your area, reply to this thread.
My wife works at a major University in the EE department. Several of the professors are worth millions because of the royalties they get from patents filed jointly with the school. Most of the research assistants (grad students) who did most of the actual work and a lot of the original thought get jack shit.
More than just this one aspect of our Uni system needs to be seriously reworked.
I just wish these rules were around when CISCO was started. If so, that would have been one company that never would have gotten off the ground. Of course, we would still be in the dark ages of computing, but considering CISCO took publicly funded inventions for routing and switching, and stole workers from Stanford to start CISCO, and now have gotten rich off of selling their equipment that was developed originally using federal funds on government equipment, I think it is a fair trade.
The fact that CISCO and many others got away with it because the universities were blind to the profits, and CISCO made millions off of publicly funded projects shows that the university patenting and then licensing inventions made by their students is stifling innovation, as students who become aware of this will hold back inventions. However, I am not sure that this is a bad thing in this case, since the university/government is paying the bills (yes, he paid tuition and other costs, but certainly received far more from the university/government.)
While I don't know all the circumstances here, I can say that what I have been told by the article I see no difference between Lieberman and the founder of CISCO, taking publicly funded inventions and using them for personal gain, and making folks who exploit them (but not pay for them) rich beyond their wildest dreams. I still think that patents received for work developed for federal funding should belong to the people (in otherwords, they have already been paid for and should be open source for all to use.)
Didn't Lieberman actually pay to join MIT?
If I'm not mistaking that payment is for the right to get educated as well as the right to use MIT resources.
Or do universities go the music industry way? "Sure, we'll teach you, but only after sold us your soul."
I'd understand if MIT would want to use the algorithm themselves free of charge. But these practices hurt innovation.
I hadn't the slightest objection to his spending his time planning massacres for the bourgeoisie... (P.G. Wodehouse)
I cannot think of one positive thing that a university would ultimately gain by doing this.
First, I think it would kill innovation and initiative because can some someone, who already has to bear the risks and personal sacrifices in order to Sheppard an idea to a finished product, bear the additional burden of having their university impose stiff upfront fees and royalty requirements. Think new semiconductors, solar energy, and biotech.
Secondly, what is next? I can imagine former students being sued by their alma maters because the products they invented were based on technology learned at their university.
I ran what I call a software sweatshop at Texas A&M University for 3.5 years (federal contracts, graduate student labor). There were many win-wins with this set up. The government got cheap software to solve real problems. Graduate student had jobs that provided real work experience and some pay (good by univerisity standards, horrible by real world standards).
...
Texas A&M's bureacracy visited several times to make sure we understood their ownership of what we were doing and constantly prodded us to see if there was something that could be 'spun off'. I never really inderstood how things 100% paid for the by federal government (and therefore the taxpayers) could somehow become the private property of The University which it would then gladly exclusively license -- there by converting something publicly created into something privately owned.
It seems that since the founding of this country all we have done is chip away at the concept of 'public ownership'. Soon the Federal government will be selling the national parks to the highest bidder and then the more lucrative departments of the government like the IRS, FDA
When I went to MIT (and I presume it's the same now), you only had to give up your inventions if MIT was paying you for your development work, through an assistantship or other form of support. Most grad students fall into this category.
visit a patent attorney and consider quitting school to market it. You can always go back to school after you are rich.
from TFA: "designed a water bottle that could be filled with sand and reused as a brick to build housing in developing countries". if no-one would use a bottle as brick here.. why should "developing countries" want them? you shouldn't offer what you don't want for yourself. most of all, Developing countries can do by themselves, they didn't ask for anything!
Hot damn, I've even been on Slashdot for a couple years now and I didn't see this one coming!
"So the price of your grant is we get your IP" - beautiful. I was just defending education against some standard trolling, except this is real. Yuk.
Yeah, I'm pro-exploitation. That's it. You should see my pro-child-slavery web site, too.
Seriously, though. I doubt the university IP office sneaked up behind the guy in his dorm room and said "Gee, that's a mighty nice idea! We're taking it!". He was a grad student, working on a Federally funded research project (through NASA), which supplied the tools to pursue the project, and funding for his stipend, etc. He also presumably used the University's IP office to file the patent, and they are acting as agents to pursue licensing agreements.
I'm not "pro-exploitation"; I'm a researcher, and I've got some ideas in the pipeline myself that might be worth something some day. But I use University and Federal dollars to work on them, I get paid by University and Federal dollars. If I get a patent, the legal work (filing of the patent, licensing, etc) will be presumably be handled by the University IP office. Since it's covered under the Bayh-Dole act, I'll legally be entitled to a cut of any profits. It's the law, and the contract I signed. It's not everything I'd dream of, but it's better than many people get in private industry.
If a student thinks of something in his or her role as a student, they should be free to patent that idea on their own time, with their own money, if they'd like to. But, as soon as federal dollars come into the picture, the Bayh Dole act applies. You can argue that it's unfair, or that it's the return on taxpayer dollars for the Federal investment in research. Whatever you think, it's the law.
It's unfair (or at least ironic) that the University won't license this guy his own idea for nothing. However, if they decide to license it to Nike for millions of bucks, he will get a cut. I guess that's his consolation prize.
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Keep your notes in an bound book, start each new day or inventing session on a new page. Write the date at the top of each page. Describe your ideas in detail, as you think of them, including what prototypes and tests you create along the way. Have someone who is not a co-inventor and does not have a financial interest in your invention read and sign/date each page as a witness. Also, since the resources you use in creating the invention seems to be at the core of the ownership question, also note on each page what resources you are using, whether school or personal. At major milestones, make a photocopy of your breakthrough pages and mail them to yourself (snail mail) to establish a post mark date. A documented paper trail of how your invention came about is the best defense against anyone who would claim it as their own.
There are probably ways of doing the above via software rather than a lab notebook, but it would require things like a trusted time server and digital signatures. Certainly possible and would be an interesting web service. Hey, maybe I should write that in my notebook...
I know for a fact that Penn State University makes students sign something stating that all ideas or whatnot are property of the university(my friend was made when his senior project was unable to be continued without univeristy permission)
This can lead to a question of who morally owns the invention, the person who pays to do the research or the person who does the research. That has no legal weight, but may be worth discussing.
Since the university wouldn't have rights to this if the research was independently funded, I assume for discussion the government paid for the research and the university owns the patent. The obvious improvement would be if taxpayer money funded the research, then some of the royalties should go back to the government to at least give some reward to the people who really paid for it. However, the law need not make sense or be fair, so that's not the way it works.
It would seem reasonable that if taxes pay for an invention that it should be licensed without fee to people who use the method to create goods, services, or software which they give away. This returns benefit to the people who funded the research in a more diffuse way than sending money, but still seems a reasonable policy. As described this was a for-profit use so it doesn't seem different than any other user in that sense.
If the inventor was paid to work on the research, it seems to leave no legal claim and a very weak moral claim on the work product. Grad students and interns are cheap labor, but they are clearly being paid to do a job, and in the case of research the job is to discover new things.