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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."
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.
Dude, you never go full retard.
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.
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)
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.
He's didn't. I'm sure he can go lower.
I think a better idea might be to force federally-funded schools to do something similar to that. If the government is giving a researcher/professor/whatever a grant from taxes based on his or her past accomplishments, the university gets a huge chunk of it - unless I'm mistaken (and I very well could be.) For the university to then get whatever comes out of that is fundamentally stupid. From my experience, the university does nothing besides initially invest in the researchers. Well, that's not exactly true, they give me parking tickets occasionally too. I should say I'm a grad student, so I'm somewhat talking out of my ass here, and I might be biased (parking tickets!!!) but from what I can tell, the university gets more than their fair share.
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
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.
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
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.
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.
Here in Finland, universities are non-profit and thus have no need to patent their students' inventions. Yet another problem that socializing education solves if done well.
Once upon a time this was the role that educational institutions vaguely resembled.
Unfortunately such entities are "inefficient" and "bureaucratic".
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
This is so awesome.
In the past ppl got to patent their ideas.
Now it is part of the Corporate Government that can seize
any hopes young ppl now have of making it in this world.
You pay for the education, and if you do something brilliant
with what you paid for in full, they take it from you.
The Parasitic United States of America has been born.
google "32 trillion offshore needs IRS attention"
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
The word you're looking for is "ostracize," not "ostrichsize." Though turning university bureaucrats into ostriches would be highly amusing.
...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.
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
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.
I misread the title as: "Universities Pirating More Student Ideas".
After reading the blurb, I believe that I didn't misread the title after all.
Great minds think alike; fools seldom differ.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
No they didn't. They got to patent their inventions. It's debatable whether an algorithm is an invention or not, but an idea certainly isn't.
This submitter, theodp, appear to be a bit of a monomaniac about this issue and he doesn't seem to know what the hell he's talking about; take this one where he equates attribution and financial reward, two entirely different things.
Why do his stories keep appearing?
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Or, pick a school with a better policy. Carnegie Mellon doesn't own anything developed by students. That's because it is not considered a work for hire, and even for grad students a stipend is not pay for work, but for teaching assistantships etc. However, if you work over the summer as an intern for pay, are staff, or even a post-doc, then everything you create is a work for hire. One thing I wrote during the summer where I was partially funded by a DARPA grant, I wrote some very useful but simple stuff, but it took almost 2 years to get an ok to get ownership of it. I ended up rewriting it during the semester to get untainted code.
More people should be aware of the IP policies of the schools they would like to attend. Software ownership played into my decision of what graduate schools to go to (I was also accepted at MIT). While I haven't commercialized any of the ideas I came up with, I own all the software I wrote as a student and grad student, and can use it in a commercial venture in the future if I would like to. Some of the things I wrote were certainly patentable too, especially given the low bar for such patents these days.
OTOH, Carnegie Mellon has a much lower endowment than MIT or Stanford, so IP policies allowing schools to own ideas and code may be better for the schools. In the long run, that means they will probably all follow suit. In fact, Carnegie may have changed their policy since I left in '06, so it's probably best to check ahead of time for any schools you are interested in.
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
I can't speak for the post grads or researchers but at the UK university I studied CS at the policy was a bit different. We were all given log books and encouraged to use them so that if we had a good idea we could claim legal ownership of it. Also, during my third year research project I asked about ownership and was told that my project would remain mine unless I gave permission for the University could take it and run with it later (which incidentally I did and got a publication out of it).
Silly rabbit
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
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.
You hear that Bill Gates/Warren Buffet?
Haven't read the thread yet, but as I recall from accounts of back in the day, Paul Allen wrote the 8080 emulator on Harvard's DEC PDP, and Bill Gates tested his Basic interpreter on it. That's as close to significant usage of university resources for an idea as you're going to get.
The Bayh-Dole act should be repealed ASAP. Creations federally funded belong to the taxpayers. I can see that everything funded would not immediately become public domain, but should after a 17 year period equivalent to patent protection. Also a licensing percentage could be given to the university if the idea were licensed and royalties paid.
Also, the individuals/corporation involved in developing the federally funded work shouldn't have to pay up front fees to to license it, nor be able to transfer to another entity if they do license it. Up front requirements is for the good of the university in this case, but when taxpayer funded we seek the good for all of us, staring with encouraging the creators of ideas like this rather than rewarding the wealthy able to buy it.
rd
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.
Universities are also non-profit in the States. They just don't get enough money from the government to fully fund themselves (Amtrak Syndrome... /sigh), so they come up with other ways...
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
The whole argument as well as the article are completely ass-backwards. The real news should be
Universities Generate >45B in Economic Value
The key here is that the reason they made 45B is that it was worth at least that to somebody else who paid for it and now produces goods or services that are directly contributing to the economy.
The alternative is that most research just gets published as a research article, and then vanishes in some drawer and a handful of university libraries. That is why Bah-Doyle and similar acts in other countries were introduced, so that there is an experienced party that can screen research output for valuable inventions and make sure those feed back into the economy. The problem is often not a lack of good ideas, but the willingness and aptitude of the researchers to take them commercial.
Also, you and the article make it sound as if the university just takes the money and runs. That is not the case. First, the universities share the revenues with the inventors. Second, they do something for their share. The extent of support varies from institution to institution, but at a minimum they provide valuable seed funding for patents etc., without which you can't realistically even get private funding in many areas.
Many universities (such as the one I am at), do a lot more: they provide infrastructure to startups, or help find experienced people for posts such as CFO. And having an experienced CFO does wonders for the startup's ability to raise funding, so the university share tends to easily pay for itself.