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Are My Ideas Being Stolen? If So, What Then?
BinaryGrind writes "I just got started taking Computer Science classes at my local university and after reading Universities Patenting More Student Ideas I felt I needed to ask: How do I tell if any of my projects while attending classes will be co-opted by my professors or the university itself and taken away from me? Is there anything I can do to prevent it from happening? What do I need to do to protect myself? Are there schools out there that won't take my work away from me if I discover TheNextBigThing(TM)? If it does happen is there anything I can do to fight back? The school I'm attending is Southern Utah University. Since it's not a big university, I don't believe it has a big research and development department or anything of that ilk. I'm mostly wanting to cover my bases and not have my work stolen from me."
I used to think like you. Very paranoid about whatever I thought were great ideas. Don't tell anyone. Ask for a non-disclosure (NDA). I was so convinced that if I even hinted at some of my ideas, everyone would try to steal them from me.
Guess what: everyone but you thinks your idea is stupid. Really. No one wants to steal it from you.
It took me maybe 10 years to figure that out. I have a few patents, got sued too. The value of a great idea is in its execution.
Take the idea and run with it. Make it happen. Code, develop, market, etc. Just like military planning, great ideas don't survive their first implementation, but they have the potential to evolve in something great.
I have good news for you though: your question is typical of budding entrepreneurs. The simple fact that you even ask is a sign that you'll do great in the future. Just add some experience (~5 years) and you'll have the perfect mix.
Don't believe everything your read. The example in the article is the one in a million occurrence. That's not the kind of odds you want to shoot for.
--
http://fairsoftware.net/ -- where software developers and citizen journalists create fair businesses
If there going to try and take it and you've told outside people about it then can they still patent it. At least that should allow you to use your idea when you leave even if they also get to use it.
thank God the internet isn't a human right.
I don't mean to sound rude, but you probably won't do anything anyone would care to steal (aside from another student) while you're in school anyway.
If you are doing something really interesting, use your own computer to do it. You could still discuss it with your professors and fellow students, but maybe it would be harder for them to take your work.
RIT (Rochester Institute of Technology) used to (when I was there 1999-2004, I do not know if they changed it) have a policy that unless there was some other contract due to outside funding or some unusual circumstance, work done by the students belonged to the students.
Go green: turn off your refrigerator.
I think that's a good title for a song...
If you really want to disconnect your ideas from the University, you have to make absolutely sure that you don't develop your ideas on university time or property.
Therefore, document when and where you're working on your idea, and have evidence that can, as clearly as possible, make a case for your having worked on this idea on your own time, with your own resources.
I'm trustworthy and will take care of everything. That is your best course of action. In times of economic uncertainty and political turmoil this is especially true.
It's hard to believe that's how Micronians are made. Why don't we see it right now by having you both kiss one another?
Well, first, be careful what you sign. And second, don't use college resources or turn in any code from your project in as homework. People wonder why America is losing its edge and it's because corporations and organizations steal ideas from the poor to make themselves rich. The net result is there is no incentive for innovation unless it is under contract, NDA, lock and key. Which is another way of saying there will be no innovation, at least not in this country. The concept of intellectual property is artificial and harmful to the public good, but our legislators don't care because they've reduced the definition of the public good to the Gross Domestic Product.
If you want to innovate... Move to a developing country. The United States is just a stagnant cesspool when it comes to science and technology these days.
#fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
You just started taking CS classes? What are you worried about, someone is going to steal your Hello World or ArrayList implementation? Seriously though, anything you code in there has prior art - perhaps from the students who took those courses last semester.
Keep a very detailed diary of everything you work on. Names, dates, places, everything. Then if you are really paranoid, place the diary in an escrow service.
If at any point someone claims to have invented something and you know it's yours, you have everything there to prove it.
To Terminate, or not to Terminate, that's the question - SCSIROB
Don't share your brilliant ideas in class projects. You don't need to submit something novel or patentable for a school project.
If you're "just beginning to take" CS classes, I'll assume you're an undergraduate. I really don't think that you have much to worry about.
--
$tar -xvf
Maybe you think that the Magic Square solution you stole from the internet needs to be protected but it doesn't. Maybe you should just chill a little.
This suggestion was invented by Shampoo.
Here's your best bet. Granted, I don't expect you to come up with the next big idea while learning to develop code, if you work on your stuff on your own resources and time, they have no rights to your code.
;)
Just don't turn it in as a homework assignment
Good quote, too many chars. Seriously, the slashdot 120 char limit sucks!
If your ideas are so good, even before you graduate from college, then surely you will have even better ones later on, after you have more experience? What's with the fear of sharing your ideas? You can be open, there is nothing wrong with sharing, if you do, then you will find other people have things to share with you, too.
But if you really care, don't work on any of your ideas using school resources, and don't mention them to people. Then no one will steal them. Patents are kind of expensive for a student, and may not be valid anyway.
Once again, stop being so selfish. You'll be happier in life (and richer!) if you just focus on producing, and not on preventing other people from producing.
Qxe4
But your idea for a beer bong has already been taken. And don't even get me started on your ideas about transgendered midget porn.
See my journal for slashdot ID's by year. Mine created in 2005. http://slashdot.org/journal/289875/slashdot-ids-by-year
Nobody can steal it and patent it if you publish it. Of course, that means you can't patent it, either.
But publish it right here on /.
I won't steal your idea....honest....
"City hall" in German is "Rathaus" Kinda explains a few things......
I think the key statement in the previous article that you mentioned was the following: "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." FEDERALLY FINANCED RESEARCH. If you are a part of any federally financed research, then yes, your invention belongs to the college/university. The other key statement was "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." Are you using school resources to create/discover this invention? Just because you are going to school there, doesn't mean that anything you create while there belongs to them. Sitting in your dorm creating the design for cold fusion using your own PC would not allow them to take it from you. Of course, the usual IANAL applies to this post.
If you "just got started taking Computer Science classes", I'd say its relatively unlikely that you need to be worried about IP theft. Your implementation of 'Hello World' probably isn't going to revolutionize computing.
This doesn't mean that it isn't something to be aware of in the future, especially as you get closer to your senior project or grad school work. Right now however, you probably should be more concerned with other classmates, depending on how draconian your school is with regards to similar / identical code beding submitted for projects. Learn what your institution's policy is, and you'll likely find the answer to your original question as well.
--sugarman--
Best to drop out now.
Of course, you could ask if this is the policy of your school?
Nah, just drop out.
"Kittens give Morbo gas!"
You wouldn't be mucking round with it in a CS class.
So drink up. Smoke one if you need to relax.
You really need to relax, perhaps if you relax you can get a really good idea.
Or alternatively...
What's your idea?
Add copyright notices to all your source files, reports and other documents. If you discover the university is using your ideas, go ahead and sue them for infringement.
So you think you can do something about the potential that your alleged ideas may be stolen while at university or after you leave?
I doubt you can do anything because for most universities and places of work, the work you do while there belongs to the university/workplace and not you, I am afraid.
The worst they could do is take it and commercialize it. But they'll never take it from your brain.
The society for a thought-free internet welcomes you.
First, it's unlikely you're going to come up with a huge, novel idea in the course of one of your class projects, especially in the first few years of your career. Not impossible, but unlikely. If you do, and if it's an academic idea, and you know it's really big, then you probably should talk to your professors about it. A big academic idea means writing a paper, and you want the help of someone who knows that business. You'll co-author the paper with your professor, get a great reference and have publication to boot. Professors generally are happy to take on undergraduate research students, especially if they are smart enough to generate publishable research. Also, they can tell you if the field already explored your idea 30 years ago and found it to be less huge than expected (you'd be amazed at how much research has already taken place in CS).
If you come up with some kickass business idea, people generally aren't going to take it because they're not as excited as you. Take good precautions though when talking about it, of course, but recognize that at some point you're going to have to let people know because it's hard to go down that path alone. It's also good to have someone to bounce your ideas off of; We've all had a few "brilliant" ideas that we realized were crap as soon as we tried explaining them to someone.
Second, most people you will come into contact with on a daily basis aren't out to steal your ideas (as I mentioned above, others typically aren't as excited about them as you). As long as you're not an asshole, and you have healthy, friendly relationships with those around you, most folks you know in a university setting will be glad to help you turn your idea into reality. One piece of advice that I was given is to keep a notebook of your thoughts as they relate to your ideas. Keeping a notebook (a la Da Vinci, not a laptop) generally is a great idea, but it can be helpful in proving ownership of your idea and that it was developed off university/company time.
'Every story, if continued long enough, ends in death.' --Ernest Hemingway
Don't worry about people stealing your ideas. If your ideas are any good, you'll have to ram them down people's throats.
Howard Aiken
US computer scientist (1900 - 1973)
Often wrong but never in doubt.
I am Jack9.
Everyone knows me.
Are you worried about your ideas being stolen or your work? They are two entirely separate things. AFAIK, just because you come up with some idea doesn't entitle you to profit from it: you have to implement it and convince people to pay for it.
If it is your work you are concerned with then it is yours from the moment you create it (for so is the very definition of copyright), unless you sign something explicitly giving it to your University.
If they patent something you do, and you have a record of you doing it beforehand (preferably a year before hand) then you have prior art which invalidates their patent.
all your base are belong to us
Do anything that matters in your spare time on your own PC, just do what you need to do to get decent grades during uni time- chances are if you're inventing something that really is new then it's well above and beyond what would be expected for top marks. It would be impossible for a university to ask that top marks style stuff be something new and groundbreaking of every student.
I suppose there are fringe cases where you may really, really need the university's computing power, or at least you may think you do, but in this case innovate, either pay for some cloud computing time or build a distributed system with your friends or similar.
I guess it's kinda different for post-grad stuff but at that point you need to build a relationship with them, if you're paying them a small fortune to do post-grad stuff then you're well within your rights to ask what you can and can't keep in terms of intellectual property. If they're paying you as a researcher or similar then it's the same as any other job- tough shit because they're paying you to come up with this research and these new ideas.
The other question is of course, are you really doing anything so groundbreaking it's going to be worth patenting anyway? I've "discovered" things once or twice before only to find I'd been beaten to the punch albeit hidden in the deep depths of the net that I only discovered after doing searches that were somewhat related to my solution that I'd never have found had I not figured out what the solution to the problem was in the first place.
If the University's policy is that work done by students is the property of the university, they are not "stealing" your ideas. They are commercializing what you have assigned to them. Find out what they give you in return. Even if all you get is your name on a patent, it's a great resume builder (remember, whatever your agreement says, a prof. can't just steal your idea and claim it's his; a patent MUST list all of the inventors and only the inventors; if an inventor is intentionally omitted, or a non-inventor is intentionally added, the patent is VOID).
I don't represent you. This post is not legal advice.
Today's Sesame Street was brought to you by the number e.
...more tin foil on your hat. That'll keep the thought-police outta your head.
I know what you're thinking. Did I forward 65,535 packets or 65,536 packets?
I have an idea and business plan that revolves around a website. After developing the idea, my 'partner' has outsourced everything to someone who has money. Now because of my age and lack of experience im afraid someone else is going to profit from my IP, can i file a patent protecting myself!?!
This is an excellent point, and many workplaces (as I understand it) are the same - stuff worked on on company time using company resources is owned by the company. You can do your own thing on your own time with your own equipment, but otherwise you're basically stealing company equipment for personal use. Yeah, school is cool and it has lots of resources you don't have at home, but that doesn't mean you can start a business with your school's equipment, hehe. Hosting a web host on the school's web server probably isn't a good idea. Of course, nobody would think of doing that, but it's the same principle with other university property that people think less of... like an internet connection.
All the professors, who had research grants for various topics, basically asked their students to do the same research as final papers. It was a great way for them to develop new ideas.
My friend and I came up with a computer vision algorithm we thought was pretty clever and the professor wanted our source code. But since that wasn't part of the assignment, we refused.
Yes, it really sucked.
I like lists:
1. Ideas cannot be patented or copyrighted. If you let an idea out of your head and someone hears it, they can use it. Now, you can ask people to sign an NDA (non-disclosure agreement) and non-compete agreement, but I doubt your professors would sign.
2. If someone else tries to patent something you have created, you have prior art. You can't get a patent for it, but you can void their patent. Yeah, it's a pain, but it can be done.
3. I'd be more worried about other students. Your professors probably have a sweet deal. At my school, it meant 6-figure salary and teaching 0-1 classes per semester and spending the rest of one's time investigating what they found interesting. Why would they leave that for the competition of free enterprise? Your other students might have dreams of grandeur and snatch your stuff more readily.
4. If you're a grad student doing research for them and they're paying you and giving you free tuition, you likely have no protection since they're your employer and what you make is legally their property unless you've explicitly made another arrangement.
I'm from the camp that ideas are a dime a dozen and that execution is what matters. If you talk about it, most likely no one will use your idea because they won't execute. Most likely you won't either - not because you're bad or lazy, but because executing something from scratch takes a lot (both work and chance).
So, don't worry too much and if you don't want someone stealing your idea, keep it to yourself.
At the top of every project and homework assignment, stamp it 'patent pending, TM 2008 [your name]. All rights reserved' Its annoying but your teachers get the idea. Some teachers may give you crap but others will most likely think it a good idea and some students may even follow your lead.
If you are working on a masters project, you may find it hard to get your professors to sign an NDA however.
This is my sig. There are many like it but this one is mine.
Reminded me of these guys and their infomercials.
Most of the stuff you do for school projects isn't marketable anyway. If you are given a set of requirements, then you aren't coding your idea, you are coding theirs, and their idea probably isn't marketable.
If you have an open-ended assignment that specifically requires you to come up with a new idea, just come up with something stupid that barely meets the requirements. Keep your *real* ideas to yourself, and you won't have anything to worry about.
As an engineering student i know for a fact that one of my composite designs was used by my faculty adviser/mentor for a profitable research project.
What did i get? 8 bucks an hour as a lab assistant and the grade of a B for my troubles.
Get used to it.
You dont think the company you will eventually work for will profit off of all of your hard work and ideas? Think again
Its called industry... thats why they pay you
If you paid a few million dollars for infrastructure, then tought people how to use it, and taught them how to do things and how to think, and then they used your tools, and the knowledge you taught them, on their premisses, while you were teaching them, to invent something, you'd expect it to be yours too.
They aren't stealing it from you. You're giving it to them. There are some schools that opt to waive this obvious right, but they do so as an incentive to attract students, not because they don't have the right in the first place.
If you don't want your ideas to become theirs -- and it's up for debate that they'd be your ideas in the first place since you're being taught -- then follow a few simple guidelines:
- don't do your work using university tools/machines. If you didn't purchase that time with the particle accellerator, then it wasn't yours to use.
- don't do your work while taking a course that teaches you how to do that kind of work. Otherwise, it's simply your homework.
- don't do your work during school hours, on school premisses, or with school personnel. If it's more them than it is you, who are you foolin'?
Look, it's quite simple. If while going to school to take theorhetical mathematics, you spent your nights in your basement, in your own home, with mastercraft tools, building car motor that runs on urine, your university won't claim that they own it just because you added 2 + 2 in your notes -- and no judge will back them up if they try.
Contrast that with taking an applied engineering and mechanics course, and spending the hour before and after every tutorial session in the school's mechanics garage, with the school's million-dollar nasa engine prototype, building a car motor that runs on urine. If it was your idea -- and wasn't suggested by your professor as a part of teaching -- it wasn't your tools, your investment, or your anything else. And odds are your professor gave you special credit for working on it.
In short, if you work for someone else, and you don't spend any money of your own, it's not really your invention. Ideas are crap, there's no shortage of them. Work, infrastructure, tools, resources, and investment is for real. Only the work part could be considered yours, and you probably got helping hands from other students and faculty in the process.
I had the same problem, when I saw a few of the other students work suddenly appearing on places like sourceforge, with people slightly changing code (naming conventions) but then you would have to say that this is a small price to pay to learn what you need to know. I followed this rule to a tee...
1- Kept my projects short and sweet to get the credit...and always tried to involve something in my project that I would need for my "real" project.
2- Described in short what I wanted to do, with slight differences on things I already knew, that way when it came to understanding the core of the logic, the person would have a hard time really knowing what I was working on.
3- Beat them to the punch, as much as I don't like sourceforge, too many rules for using your own code...etc....I do thank the stars they offer a package where I can upload my project for some to see(those i say is permissible) and gives me a level of protection for my source code.
I wish you luck, as this is only as good as the person getting their project to work.
If you must, ask them to sign a disclosure form, that they can legally grade you without you losing your work. If they really isn't anything worth while...they will sign it, if they think they might want to keep it, they say no...then you know to change your project to something smaller less like what u r trying to accomplish and more like a regular average Joe project.
If you come up with the next big thing using your school's resources, then you need to come up with some sort of shared ownership agreement. I believe MIT does this?
For example, if you develop a cool new shared memory cache super-duper distributed hash algorithm that works only on massive clusters, and you use the school's clusters to do that, you're toast.
Simple, really? It's no different than the corporate world.
On the other hand, if you have a sneaking suspicion that you're on to something, then I suggest doing all that on your own time and on your own computer and network connection. Don't turn it in as homework or share it with your teachers.
Web2.0: I love when people Flickr my cuil and digg my boingboing until my google is reddit and I start to yahoo
People that have the idea for the next big thing, really have lots of ideas for lots of next big things. They just can't help it. If you've only got one idea, probably it sucked anyway and you shouldn't get too wrapped up in it. We all can't be creative people, any more than we can be rock stars.
This is my sig.
Leonardo Da Vinci had the same fears and would obfuscate his drawings and encode his handwriting. So encrypt stuff.
Other than that, I don't think anyone gives a crap about what a CS student has for ideas. It takes a lot more than just an idea to get anything done. Genius really is 5% inspiration and 95% perspiration.
And as a 31 year old, I can say that in the business world nobody would listen to me at all until I was about 26 or so simply due to age. Now it's sometimes. Unless you can successfully implement your idea mostly yourself, nobody will be stealing your ideas.
Also, get off my lawn.
Isn't this what open source is designed for? Let the community have it and let it grow. If you set it free it'll come back to you, like Bambi or something.
11 was a racehorse
12 was 12
1111 Race
12112
A few years ago a colleague and I were talking over lunch, and I suggested that the next big thing would be an open platform for mobile devices - kind of like the IBM PC in the 80's. By offering a standard platform, consumers would have the same choice which drove the PC revolution.
A few back-of-the-napkin calculations later, and we figured we could bring it to market for about 10 million USD.
We went back to work, never formed a startup. Here, a few years later, Google is bringing the Android to market.
The lesson: good ideas are not that uncommon. Having the drive, vision, and backing of venture capital is. Maybe you have a good idea. But there's no point in hiding it, because chances are that someone else also has the same idea. The worst you could do is to keep it secret while someone else patents it.
If you think it is good, discuss it with others. If they think it is good, document it, (Witnesses!), and discuss it with someone in the industry. Publish - that will protect you from the patent trolls. But don't think that keeping it secret will do you or anyone else any good.
The society for a thought-free internet welcomes you.
It sounds like your an undergrad, if you are you most likely won't be doing anything steal-worthy in class. Generally, if any ideas will be stolen it will be the research efforts of a masters/ phd student.
What about Puffs? Store brand? They're all the same right? Yet all those can still make money. Just because you thought of something or didn't doesn't mean you can't still profit from it, patents be damned. Ford paid an engine patent in the beginning and still made a killing.
So MS would come up with this brilliant idea 2+3+5 = 11 -1 = 10 and then patent it.
May be you can patent - triple mouse clicks to open porn.
If you look at all of the worlds great inventions, others were working on the same thing at the same time. The guys that got credit were the ones who got there a little earlier than the rest. Just look at the invention of the airplane as an example. Folks all over the World were working on it but the Wrights got there first for powered flight. And if you look at modern aircraft, their designs are based on French inventor's ideas - who were working on powered flight at the same time as the Wrights. The Wrights did try to sue those others, but that's another story.
Anyway, the Next Great Things are so fringe, even if you told the World about them, folks will think you're crazy.
In the US if you did not sign an agreement assigning your inventions to anyone else you own them. If you did, they aren't being stolen: you sold them.
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
Aha! Thanks for the great idea!
1: Become Professor
2: Steal students ideas/work
3: Profit!!!
Funny. I remember when I was in University (early 90's) I read some fine print in a student manual that plainly stated that the university had the right to patent your work. The notice wasn't hidden, but it was probably ignored by many people.
Each University has their own policy on this, and will make it pretty easy to find. Most University policies that I've looked at look something like this:
'Any work that you submit as part of your course requirements is the property of the University. Any work that you do while working on a research project for the University is the property of the University.'
Not surprisingly, this is the basic premise of many employment contracts as well.
'Anything you make while working for us is automatically our property.'
There are always exceptions, of course, for work that is done by you, on your own time and equipment, that has nothing to do with your coursework/job.
I've never really felt that these policies are that obscene, and I think that if you take a few minutes to think about it objectively, you may feel the same. In no case is someone laying claim to anything that might fall out of your head, only the material that you will produce at the explicit request of someone else (either your instructor or employer).
I hope you don't seriously believe your idea is going to get you anything without some implementation behind it. I suggest you google your unique idea, and then patent it, and try suing all the other suckers who have the same idea.
ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.
Simple. Yes, the idea was tested and developed using the school resources. BUT!! Tuition is payed specifically to use those resources. The resources belong to them, but for a fee, they allow you to use it, something like, licensing. Analogy to school's reasoning is: Adobe should own every picture created or modified in Photoshop, because the software is theirs, they simply license it to you.
If you have a particular idea that's really -that- good, make a copy of everything you have on it, then mail it to yourself certified mail. When you get it, DO NOT OPEN IT and lock it in a fire-proof safe or put it in a deposit box at your local bank.
Certified mail is time-stamped by the Federal government. While not fool-proof, it's the closest thing you can get to proving you had the idea before someone else.
-- "Government is the great fiction through which everybody endeavors to live at the expense of everybody else."
Seriously. Wherever this way of thinking came from, you should stop it now.
How do I tell if any of my projects while attending classes will be co-opted by my professors or the university itself and taken away from me?
Do the same boring stuff and get an A. With all of your spare time go out (as in outside, to a new place) with friends new and old, meet and date as many girls as possible.
Oh, and finally, the Next Big Thing is usually built on top of a waste heap of NextBigThing business failures and copycats the size of a small mountain anyway.
Work on something ordinary and boring, make it extraordinary then maintain it as a GPL project. The old way of "wood shedding" just doesn't work out in the U.S. If it is by extraordinary chance a novel idea it'll be copied in 1/5 the time somewhere else in the world and/or litigated into oblivion.
Vonage is a good example of what happens to a good idea in the U.S. these days. They had a boring idea, "cheap phone service" and made it good enough. They were then patent litigated into oblivion by the telcos ridiculously vague and not-unique telco patents.
Imagine instead a decentralized (bittorrent-like) VOIP network of Free components with your name at the head of the project. It's a great calling card and the telco's can't possibly keep the genie in the bottle with that model.
Blah. Too many words, too many ideas. Get a life first.
http://www.maxineudall.com/2010/02/should-economists-be-sued-for-malpractice.html
Federal funding of universities needs to be cut. Many are hording large pools of cash and yet keep increasing student tuition. Couple that with profiting off of their students ideas and frankly we shouldn't continue to pour tax money into these entities. The time has come to start auditing schools and supplementing funding based on need.
Thats exactly it, if you want something to truely be yours, don't work on it at school or using school resources, same for the office as it works the same way there too. So really, if you do think of something, before you commit anything to a physical/digital media, you need to make a decision on what you want to do with it and how you want to handle it. Do you want to share it? Do you want to give it to the university/company/whatever, forsaking all your rights except intellectual property? Or do you want it to be all yours? Once you know that, then commit the information to the media form of your choice, ensuring to take the proper precautions if you want to keep it to yourself.
In "The Zen of Graphics Programming", Michael Abrash (a co-author of Quake and inventor of Mode X) wrote:
-------------
Our world is changing, and I'm concerned. By way of explanation, three anecdotes.
Anecdote the first: In one of his books, Frank Herbert, author of Dune, told me how he had once been approached by a friend who claimed he (the friend) had a killer idea for a SF story, and offered to tell it to Herbert. In return, Herbert had to agree that if he used the idea in a story, he'd split the money from the story with this fellow. Herbert's response was that ideas were a dime a dozen; he had more story ideas than he could ever write in a lifetime. The hard part was the writing, not the ideas.
Anecdote the second: I've been programming micros for 15 years, and been writing about them for more than a decade and, until about a year ago, I had never-not once!- had anyone offer to sell me a technical idea. In the last year, it's happened multiple times, generally via unsolicited email along the lines of Herbert's tale.
This trend toward selling ideas is one symptom of an attitude that I've noticed more and more among programmers over the past few years-an attitude of which software patents are the most obvious manifestation-a desire to think something up without breaking a sweat, then let someone else?s hard work make you money. Its an attitude that says, "I'm so smart that my ideas alone set me apart." Sorry, it doesn't work that way in the real world. Ideas are a dime a dozen in programming, too; I have a lifetime's worth of article and software ideas written neatly in a notebook, and I know several truly original thinkers who have far more yet. Folks, it's not the ideas; it's design, implementation, and especially hard work that make the difference.
Virtually every idea I've encountered in 3-D graphics was invented decades ago. You think you have a clever graphics idea? Sutherland, Sproull, Schumacker, Catmull, Smith, Blinn, Glassner, Kajiya, Heckbert, or Teller probably thought of your idea years ago. (I'm serious-spend a few weeks reading through the literature on 3-D graphics, and you'll be amazed at what's already been invented and published.) If they thought it was important enough, they wrote a paper about it, or tried to commercialize it, but what they didn't do was try to charge people for the idea itself.
A closely related point is the astonishing lack of gratitude some programmers show for the hard work and sense of community that went into building the knowledge base with which they work. How about this? Anyone who thinks they have a unique idea that they want to "own" and milk for money can do so-but first they have to track down and appropriately compensate all the people who made possible the compilers, algorithms, programming courses, books, hardware, and so forth that put them in a position to have their brainstorm.
Put that way, it sounds like a silly idea, but the idea behind software patents is precisely that eventually everyone will own parts of our communal knowledge base, and that programming will become in large part a process of properly identifylng and compensating each and every owner of the techniques you use. All I can say is that if we do go down that path, I guarantee that it will be a poorer profession for all of us - except the patent attorneys, I guess.
Anecdote the third: A while back, I had the good fortune to have lunch down by Seattle's waterfront with Neal Stephenson, the author of Snow Crash and The Diamond Age (one of the best SF books I've come across in a long time). As he talked about the nature of networked technology and what he hoped to see emerge, he mentioned that a couple of blocks down the street was the pawn shop where Jimi Hendrix bought his first guitar. His point was that if a cheap guitar hadn't been available, Hendrix's unique talent would never have emerged. Similarly, he views the networking of society as a way to get affordable creative tools to many people, so as much talent as possible can be unearthe
"99 dead duelists of Dios on the wall. 99 dead duelists of Dios! Take one's ring, pass it around..."
Unless the professor assigned the project, imediately upon realizing that some research development may be patentable take it out of the school, give it to a relative, friend whatever. Stop all research on it at school and find another project to cover your school requirements. Yeah I know they will ask but you can say that the research was going no where and just let it drop.
Legal no, but it's your work, they should not get the benefit.
I don't know about the US, but here in the UK universities can lay claim to anything you submit, if they so choose. I know there's a clause in the application/acceptance agreement that says exactly that. If I want to learn from them I have to give them rights to anything I produce.
Of course, I can't imagine them not crediting me, so I'm not worried.
It's Comp Sci, fer crissakes. You're not gonna come up with anything of any value. And let's say you were in a program that's heavy on research, whatever you come up with is on university / research funds, time and equipment. It's no different than being employed. Do you think engineers working at GM or Intel, or IBM get to keep their patents? You do get your name on the patents though, so there's some recognition there.
I peeked at it. Interesting idea, though a little tricky to determine some important information because your demo is heavily crippled.
File Size: Is that "Sound-Picture" smaller than a typical Mp3? Does your full version even fully support Mp3?
If a picture turns out to be more compressed than a straight audio file, that might be a neat way to save space.
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
This was the comment I was looking for. The policy at my university (IIRC) was that any work you did on university property (as in their systems) belonged to the university. Also - Anything I did for homework, or as part of a class project also belonged to the university.
If I developed something on a computer in my dorm (even using the university internet access) it was considered mine. Which I thought was completely fair.
1) Anything I'm doing for homework isn't valuable beyond that class, or the curriculum. It WAS valuable to other students who looked to take those classes later. The university claimed it was their property so they could store it and compare it to future homework submissions. they certainly didn't plan on selling my "Hello World!" renditions, nor were they interested in a Java socket that simulated interference to demonstrate the ability of connection based protocols to slow a connection and error correct.
2) If I developed something using their resources, I was free to walk away with my code (which I did, I still have some of it). But I wasn't going to make anything there that was worth selling anyway. I understood that. The real value was in figuring out how to make something useful to me first, and then useful to others later.
An MP3 is essentially an audio file run through and FFT with the coefficients stored. Sound familiar? It's very similar to JPG, but optimized to throw away stuff our ear won't hear instead of throwing away stuff our eye won't see.
Not to say that paranoia is good, but after thirty years of software development as well as patented product development you can't be naive.
When it comes to software, the ownership issue for better or worse is actually quite simple. Very rarely if ever do you have clear and legal ownership of what you code.
Check with the schools legal department as many schools claim complete ownership of anything you do including your groundbreaking PHD Thesis.
When you finaly get a contract or permanent position programming, you will find that the employer again claims complete ownership of anything that you write. In contract positions you will almost always be required to sign a non-disclosure and code ownership agreement that grants complete ownership to the company. This also includes your handy library code stash. I speak from experience. If they want to, they can legaly prevent you from using your code on any other contracts or even personally.
As far as patenting anything else, consider yourself warned. Every single state bar in the US has very loose rules regarding legal and ethical behavior of Patent Attorneys.
As an example, If you were to walk into a Criminal Defense Attorneys office for a free consultation and confess to a murder you committed, he would be obligated to maintain the attorney client privilege regardless of whether he takes your case or not.
Now for the Patent Attorney. He offers a free consultation regarding a wonderful new idea that you have. He signs a non-disclosure agreement and you spend the next few hours detailing your idea. After you leave he calls his business partner and proceeds to patent your idea and there is nothing you can do about.
UNLESS YOU HAVE A SIGNED CONTRACT OF REPRESENTATION AND IN MOST CASES A RETAINER DEPOSIT, HE IS NOT YOUR PATENT ATTORNEY AND HAS NO LEGAL OR ETHICAL OBLIGATION TO REPRESENT YOU.
As for the non-disclosure agreement since you were speaking to him without representation he is free to divulge your information to his business partner. If you don't believe me contact the US Patent Office.
Shameless Plug... Coming Fall 2009, "Patently Absurd - Everything you didn't want to know about PAs but I'm going to tell you anyway"
Oh I investigated the question and there's no way saving an image is more efficient than an MP3, regardless of the compression, unless you're prepared for massive quality loss. However, I think some sort of vectorisation could be developed to store more efficiently graphical data, in this case you could probably end up with extreme sorts of speech compressions.
No, MP3s aren't supported yet, only OGGs and WAVs, but it's on the TODO list. A short sound every 3 seconds = heavily crippled? If that's about the resynthesis quality I'm working on it at the very moment (making sounds sound more faithful to the original) and I'll release version 1.2 with that improvement in a couple of days.
You just got troll'd!
Just like a job, if someone is paying you to do work, or come up with ideas then they have rights to them. Typically it's spelled out clearly in your contract.
However when it comes to Universities, this is where there is a lot of muck and confusion.
1) If you are WORKING for the university or using THEIR equipment AND (this is the important part) you have signed something stating they own the works from what you develop... then yeah... they own it. I've NEVER seen this not clear and usually involved someone unhappy that a great idea they came up with isn't going to make them a millionaire simply because they didn't negotiate well in their contract.
2) Working for the University is defined as being actually paid $$ or getting a free ride paid for by the institution.
3) If you didn't sign anything where it says your ideas belong to them while working for them... then they don't pure and simple.
NC State is a great example of this. As long as you do it on your own time with your own equipment you're fine. Otherwise you have to write some kind of agreement to use their facilities for your research. Generally it involves you paying them for use of their facilities and can be costly. That's the price of having access to advanced technology you couldn't otherwise afford.
And like many above have said... if your idea is that great... if it's that amazing... don't use their equipment. Just don't take a chance. Otherwise, please don't complain.
Truly, this is pathetic. You are in fear about your ideas being stolen even before you ever HAD an idea.
You want to preventively attack or better load your guns and put yourself on the defensive even before a possible but, alas, non-existent "enemy" yet.
You don't even know if/what kind of research your University does, and already are thinking about "firing back".
You seem negative, angry, ready to attack. Maybe you want an "enemy" or a competitor in other words to be able to give birth to your idea.
Well, it's certainly not going to be a world changing idea one made in this stress.
Good ideas come from creativity and openness, not from a preemptive fight.
If you accept someone else's view of things, look at your study and University with openness, let your idea(TM) peacefully come to you and just then make up a good framework to use your idea. It will all be much easier then.
Disclaimer: I work in robotics R&D.
I'm very open about my ideas (so much so that I've dropped a couple of clients when they got all paranoid about NDAs and so on) mostly because I'm very happy about being shown something cool about something that I originally came up with that even I didn't think about.
What DOES annoy me is attribution -- if people want to use my stuff, please do (even if they end up making more money from it than me), I'll come up with something else cool tomorrow/next week/next month anyway. BUT if they use my stuff it better have my name on it. I solved my last attribtion dispute while an undergrad -- a grad student decided to ask for my help solving a problem (some PHP thing IIRC), have me essentially deal with the entire situation, and put it in his project without attribution. The dispute was solved by me holding the guy over a railing on the roof of the lab until he decided that properly giving credit was preferrable to a three floor drop.
As a general rule, anecdotes aside, your best protection is to keep incremental backups of your project so that you can show the work from the embryonal stages if paternity ever comes up; even if you're publishing / opensourcing, it's legitimate to keep those backups private until you need to throw them at somebody.
Do you wake up in the morning and realise that you no longer have an idea that you had yesterday? Maybe you should see a doctor.
Doesn't it make you feel good to know that our freedoms are protected by politicans, lawyers and journalists.
Move to the University of Waterloo; you keep your own IP, and then you don't need to worry about this.
1. ShortSound/3Sec : I can only assume that's a cripple feature, and it's pretty bad. I almost thought it was a bug until I took out my stopwatch and timed it.
2. I think saving image files is disabled. Thus I had to ask and couldn't have looked for myself.
3. Quality Crippling!? I hope not. There'd be no way to tell if it's just the state of the art as you know it vs. a protection feature.
(Grinding back on topic)
We're in a thread about people's opinions of how much IP is worth. Your measures rank pretty high up on the CrippleDemo scale, so you must be concerned about people's reception to your program.
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
Forget these jerks who say you won't have any good ideas in college. If you have a good innovative idea, don't submit it to the school, just give them what the prof asks for. Work on your stuff, on your personal systems. And if you really get some thing good going, pay to talk to a lawyer, not the university or /. .
It's not unheard of for an undergrad to come up with a good idea. I had two instances of such ideas getting taken to international conferences for presentation. But such instances are harder to find than hens' teeth (to find those, look behind their lips).
If you did come up with a patentable idea, and your university chose to use it, just because they got a chunk doesn't mean you'd get nothing. You'd know what was going on because it's an ethics violation that can cost someone their job, including tenure, to steal it outright and not give you credit (and a cut, if applicable). If that happened you could sue, and the publicity of that would cost them a lot more than the cut (and credit, which costs them nothing).
Openness is the best protection. If you think you have a good idea, show it off. Going public assures witnesses. But guess what? You're far more likely to be laughed at. Really. You don't know enough yet to know whether something is a good idea. If you think so, you're probably wrong. Maybe not, but probably. And on the off chance it is worth something, you're going to need help in learning what to do to develop it. And THAT is worth the cut they'd take.
"I may be synthetic, but I'm not stupid." -- Bishop 341-B
The reason universities adopt these policies is not to take ideas from students and get rich; the purpose is to prevent students from getting rich on their own. Maybe the student's idea is stupid, in which case it makes no difference. But if it's good, and the student develops it, and it comes to fruition, and it starts to make money, then the university can sue and say that it was theirs all along and that they are entitled to everything.
The wealthy and powerful corporations and bureaucrats don't like all these young upstarts up-ending the order of things and threatening to destabilize their positions at the top (even though they themselves probably got to the top by up-ending the order of things for their predecessors). One way the bureaucrats can make sure that the upstarts can do nothing is to make sure the ideas are always the property of the bureaucrats.
They'll use capitalism to get to the top but then switch the system to feudalism in order to stay at the top. Making us all into their serfs...
If you're any good at what you do you'll have a lot of good ideas so it doesn't matter if a few get "stolen." You should be flattered that someone thinks an idea or two of yours are worth putting the time into implementing themselves. At the end of the day the person looking to hire you is going to see that you have brains and not the guy who relies on everyone else to come up with ideas for them.
If you only have one "good" idea and cling to it like your life depends on it people are going to think you're an idiot with no good ideas. That and a huge hypocrite. In your life you will "steal" a lot of ideas from a variety of sources. You can call it research all you want but "your" ideas are the product of a lot of digging into other people's ideas.
So lighten up. If you're actually good at what you do you'll have plenty of big ideas to bank on.
Work Safe Porn
Intellectual Property is hot stuff these days and has been so for the last two decades or more. Everyone who has the leverage will try to rip you off, and will use all legal means available to that end. It all begins with a contract, or an agreement, that you sign. Universities claim ownership over your ideas and (publicly funded) research results as a student or postdoc. Industry employers will make you sign off to them from start any invention/innovation/idea that you might come up with, no matter if you have have your eureka moment while at work or while taking your shower at home. Some of these agreements extend for more than a year after you quit that job. More or less the same applies to public service employees. In Canada, if is a federal offence for a public servant to start up a business without first getting approval from your supervisor. It seems to me that only way to own your idea is to be self-employed for at least two years and then invest 100K in patenting it. How about that?
Well, as for the short sounds, if it wasn't for it then you could just make up for a lack of sound export feature by recording the output, which isn't such a big deal, I mean I used to do that before I implemented the feature and hardly even minded ;-). And no, image saving isn't disabled, neither is image copying to the clipboard, otherwise that would be indeed very crippling.
And no there's no quality crippling, but it could be better, which is why I'm trying to improve upon it as a priority.
I actually never thought it was that high on the CrippleDemo scale. I mean, without the short sound thing, it'd be pretty damn low.
You just got troll'd!
This talk about universities building patent portfolios concerns situations where a research team developed some useful invention, and felt that patenting it would be valuable, primarily becuase this would make it possible for a company to pick up and commercialize the invention. (And only secondarily because it would bring funding for the research team.) But most university patents start when the researchers who did the work decide a patent is valuable, and only then to they start the patent process, which becomes a part of the University's IP.
Unless you have a really malicious professor (unlikely), universities won't steal your work without your knowledge and consent. An important part of a university's mission is to help their students build a body of knowledge in their name and build reputations, so if something you did in class is worth patenting or publishing your professor will talk to you about it and present it to you as a career- and reputation-building opportunity.
If you want money from your patents, there may be restrictions in University rules, or in the form of a contract that you sign, which prevent you from going off and patenting your work for the university on your own (iIn other words, the University will own your IP), but they can't patent something without your help.
Don't worry, no one wants your ideas.
- The real litmus test is whether you are taking classes normally or whether you are getting a scholarship. If you are paying money and going to classes out of your own pocket, everything that you do remains yours, unless there's a clear major project that you are working on with the university.(say, some electric car race or whatnot).
- If you are getting a scholarship, then yes, everything is theirs, pretty much. Just keep your better ideas to yourself and learn to just find other ways to solve the problems - or use more basic approaches. Obviously if the work is in conjunction with your thesis or PHD or similar, then you're kind of stuck. Do your work, but keep your better ideas to yourself. This doesn't mean to be paranoid. Merely to be a bit cautious. Give away some ideas that are required, but not everything.
- I found that the biggest problem wasn't professors but other lazy and greedy students who would leech ideas off of others in a heartbeat. Telling your friends about some great idea at a party is sure to end up being used by whomever is listening. As they say, don't talk shop outside of work.
- Also don't talk about it online or leave your latest and greatest ideas out in the open where roommates and others can see them. It's not paranoid to have a password on your computer, after all.(same with carrying them around in your backpack or similar places where some nosy person in the library can get to them)
Since you are consulting us regarding TheNextBigThing(TM), we will now require 30% royalties on all revenue generated from TheNextBigThing(TM).
As a general rule, anything you produce while you are in college is owned by the school.
They're not taking it from you -- its theirs to begin with.
Thats why grad students have to license back any IP developed as part of their graduate work if they leave a school and start a company.
How do you think these big research schools *have* such large endowments?
This idea that an entity which provides you with research funding, space, equipment and access to specialist help is undeserving of some fruit of that labor is getting old. Half of my grant funding goes to purchase goods and services outside of my own lab (overhead), and I would hope that some of the benefits reaped in those other labs are re-invested in the university.
If you're getting something from your university/company expect them to take something from you in return. Don't be an idiot and give it all away, and don't put your great ideas into throw-away class projects. After that, you can stop whining about it. Those professors you're so afraid of are stuck in the same system.
(Grain of salt warning, it's been about 7 years)...
Drexel has a clause in it's "student contract" which entitles them to patent anything you come up with on university time or university resources.
If you live in the dorms, you're always using university resources, so give up already.
From the last /. article on this topic, it seems that the universities are arguing that they can patent student ideas because they claim the students are using significant university resources. My advice is to use as few university resources as possible if any at all. Do all your work on your own computer. Don't use the labs, etc. If you don't use their resources then they have no claim to your IP right?
Most importantly, they don't pay you, you pay them. You EMPOLY them. They are YOUR vendor. While it is not unreasonable for a corporation to force employees to sign over patent rights it IS unreasonable for a VENDOR to require a corporation to sign over patent rights to what the corporation comes up with. Similarly, it is totally OUT of line for a University to force anyone to sign over rights. Refuse to sign such a piece of paper. If they insist, point out that they already accepted you and you turned down other offers to go to them. As such, their legal position is scanty if best. If they continue to be obstiante, get a court gag order preventing them from black-balling you at other universities then sue them to allow admission. If you don't have the guts to do all of this work then honestly, you don't have the guts to take your patentable idea and make money off of it. Profit is 1% inspiration, 99% perspiration.
excitingthingstodo.blogspot.com
Either you're going to listen to the rest of the advice in sibling posts, or you'll reject it because your idea is, indeed, awesome enough to be stolen.
In that case, do the following:
UTF-8: There and Back Again
How many classes are you going to miss. Test didn't study for actual assigned products you didn't do for your next big thing...
I was one of the top CS students in my school at the time. However I had little time for my own projects. As with the other students who were just as good as me or better. We all started school thinking we will change the world and we all were so hot shot programmers that we could be the next Microsoft (We started college before Google)
The issue of stolen work happens in Grad and PHD levels not so much in the undergrad. At these levels we work on projects of our own choosing and do it our own way. Under Grad classes you have a preassigned project and/or with limited amount of time to do it (2/3 weeks)
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
Are there schools out there that won't take my work away from me if I discover TheNextBigThing(TM)?
Never make it as a class project, instead post it on /., and we will promptly advice you to make it into an open source project.
My personal experience is, if you have an idea you cannot complete yourself, it will be stolen. If the person you were working with needs to solve a problem, they will gravitate towards the best solutions they know, so theft of your best ideas is inevitable. Concentrate on being able to constantly reinventing ideas, and brainstorming new ones. If you try and hold on too tightly to your ideas, you're just dooming yourself to pain and disappointment.
If they patent it you overturn the patent by showing your class project as prior art.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
>> Therefore, document when and where you're working on your idea, and have evidence that can, as clearly as possible, make a case for your having worked on this idea on your own time, with your own resources.
One point to this: unless he's on scholarship, 100% of his time is "his own time". He's paying to go to school, not the other way around. They don't own any of his time. On this basis alone, IP ownership clauses in school policies are dubious. If the University tried to claim ownership of an idea, I'd bill them for the personal time I spent developing it - at a reasonable INDUSTRY CONSULTING rate.
Using school resources is another issue though. Although it stinks, they can make a claim there - preventing you from claiming full ownership. However, I'd still go the route of billing them for my time.
MadCow.
I used to have a sig, but I set it free and it never came back.
At a public university, the "customer" the university is servicing is not the student, but the state. A student is more an employee to the state than a customer of the university. Even for the ordinary student attending school without any special scholarships and who is not doing any explicit research under any state or federal grants, anywhere between 50-80% of the tuition to keep you in school is payed by taxpayers. That means your education is not for your benefit, but rather the state's. That's why most of the output you produce while in school legally belongs to "the system." The university's intellectual property policy usually reflects this. I think students tend to think of their public education as being mostly their own thing, so forget that they are ultimately accountable to the public. However unfair this may seem, it is pretty much the same anywhere in life. The professors, staff, and administrators are also under the same rules. In addition, in most non-academic private industries the rules are even more strict about whose ideas belong to whom and under under what conditions. All that said, there is a proper legal means for the university to partly own your ideas while still giving you formal credit. People can't just up and plagiarize or steal your ideas and claim them as their own novel work. If you suspect this is happening, you should raise bloody hell. There is a chain of ethical accountability that is maintained in an academic settings. Universities are better than most places in giving credit where credit is due because individualism is generally respected (this does frequently break down, though). This is in contrast to the private industry which doesn't honor that individualism so much.
i\hbar\dot{\psi}=\hat{H}\psi
If you only have one good idea in your lifetime, and it happens to occur while attending university, and it just so happens that your professor used it, too bad. But if you're such a freaking genius, then I'm sure you'll have many good ideas over your lifetime. Don't worry about the one that didn't get patented and ensconced within a platoon of lawyers.
p.s. Ideas can't be "stolen".
Don't blame me, I didn't vote for either of them!
If I were in this position I would post my idea online and get it published to as large an audience as possible. This effectivly puts a damper on the college ever obtaining a patent and profiting off of your work. Don't you pay enough in tutition already for this kind of back-stabbing crap?
As einstein pointed out most of the really significant works throughout history that have actually made any kind of a difference are mostly due to dedicated hard work not visions of "Y" shaped caps with magical properties appearing in your head after falling off a stool.
If you don't want your ideas to be stolen then just don't talk about your ideas. Keep your technological ideas a secret, and only use well-known and cliche ideas in your university assignments. You will still get good marks, since after all the university as it is now is not promoting independent and original thought, and after you get the degree you will be able to do whatever you want with your ideas.
...or another free software license. I know this isn't the answer you're looking for, but I'm actually surprised more of the /. community isn't replying with the same answer. We live in an age where a huuuuge amount of source code is freely shared, and software-as-a-product is dying. At the very least, it's a bad business decision.
Share your code under the GPL, and others will be able to modify your code. However, their modifications must be available to you unless they intend to keep them private...which isn't what you're worried about anyway.
You can release your GPL'd code to a community of developers, and hopefully (if the idea really is that good) you can gain support and a critical mass so you can build "TheNextBigThing". When the project is in a state of maturity, you and other developers can decide what direction to take it, or if it really is the proverbial "killer app", or whatever. And along the way, if money is your motivation, you can work out a business plan.
If you really do have "TheNextBigThing", licensing under the GPL protects your code by making sure you will have access to it and its derivatives. It also creates the potential for working with a large community of developers to improve the software. If the software gains popularity, it would also be very tough for competitors (even powerful institutions) to squash it.
I might add, as well, that proprietary apps are, more and more each day, being spanked by the FOSS competition. "Live Free or Die!" has a new meaning in the world of software...
Geeks like to think that they can ignore politics, you can leave politics alone, but politics won't leave you alone.-rms
Ideas are cheap, free even. Ideas are not patentable or copyrightable. The execution of those ideas are the only thing that can be defined and assigned a real value. That's the law at least.
Recently, I asked our university's IP person about the issue of student IP. She's not a lawyer, and we didn't get a ruling from our legal department, but her opinion was that classwork is the property of the student, whereas thesis work and paid research work, whether internally or externally funded, is the property of the university.
Legally, the university owns what I produce also, although they give me great freedom to propagate what I discover. On the other hand, if I designed potentially valuable drugs, then I might not feel so free.
There was some good advice in the replies (don't share your best ideas; work on your own equipment). Why not have a conversation with your professor to determine what he or she thinks?
Ultimately, you probably have little to worry about, for many of the reasons discussed in the replies, but it's always your responsibility to understand who owns what and under what circumstances.
Did you mean Steve Wozniak? He did wrote the BASIC interpreter and most other software for the original Apple computers. And he co-founded the company with Steven Paul Jobs, who was also a drop out.
He'd probably say "There's nobody getting rich writing software that I know of" or something like that.
Darn, I wanted to write a funny post!
Thief!
While they made billions for their investors. Stanford couldn't be bothered with student projects.
http://www.petitiononline.com/ToUS_SCt/petition.html To: The U.S. Supreme Court Justices Dear Supreme Court Chief Justice John G. Roberts, Jr., Justice John Paul Stevens, Justice Antonin Scalia, Justice Anthony M. Kennedy, Justice David H. Souter, Justice Clarence Thomas, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg, Justice Stephen G. Breyer, Justice Samuel A. Alito: We are writing to you regarding the case of Dr. Dongxiao Yue v. Sun Microsystems, et al., which is set for conference in January 2009 (Information of the case can be found at www.American-Justice.org and YouTube). In November 2007, Dr. Yue sued defendants for pirating his PowerRPC software. Evidence included defendants' internal documents showing Sun knowingly sold unauthorized and unlimited copies of PowerRPC to others. However, in March 2008, former U.S. District Judge Martin J. Jenkins dismissed Dr. Yue's lawsuit without ruling on any of the copyright claims. The District Court then awarded defendants $219,949.90 of attorneys' fees and costs under Section 505 of the U.S. Copyright Act. While Dr. Yue's appeal is ongoing, on December 15, 2008, the District Court issued a Writ of Execution directing county sheriff to take possession of Dr. Yue's assets (primarily his copyrights and his family home where his two young children live), despite Dr. Yue's request for humanitarian consideration. Dr. Yue's application for stay at the U.S. Ninth Circuit Court of Appeal was summarily denied without any explanation. Awarding software pirates under U.S. Copyright Act would encourage infringement of intellectual property and would be detrimental to U.S. economy. The lower courts should have provided Dr. Yue equal protection as other American copyright owners. We respectfully request that your Honor carefully consider Dr. Yue's arguments before the Supreme Court and make an equitable decision. Sincerely, The Undersigned 20. Kinhson Su Justice must be served! NJ, USA 19. Jian Xie Support his petition 18. Liping Cheng Justice need to be served by Supreme court 17. Dr. CHONG WANG Based on my own judgment, some personal retaliation has been involved in this case, thus a more objective, thorough, fair trial is need. 16. Yong Li This is a typical case demonstrated judges' bias, snoblish, racisim and injustice. 15. Ming Wei The case will have a profound effect on the protection of copyright including the copyrights of numerous American products worldwide. PA, USA 14. Roy Owens Justice for Yue 2 Otisfield St , Mass 13. Charles Heckman Typical Ninth Circuit tyranny Washington, U.S.A. 12. John Peterson Dr. Yue has the truth and should be granted justice 11. Facheng Lee save justice! save Dr Yue! 10. line voided 9. Betsy Combier We must abide by the Constitution and rule of law, and protect Dr. Yue's due process rights 8. Carl Bernofsky The shabby treatment of pro-se litigants by the courts must stop. Dr. Yue has clearly stated the case for infringement of his copywrite rights, and the courts must permit genuine due process to go forward in this matter. Shreveport, Louisiana 7. kang li protect the human rights toronto, canada 6. robert lackman Give Dr Yue justice 5. Carol Long This illegal court abuse is going on all over the USA. In San Diego the courts are a mess. Allowing purjury and many other laws to be broken. What next, please allow Dr. Yue to win this case. 4. Cheryl Kennedy Dr. Yue has a Constitutional Right to be heard at a jury trial. The corruption and judicial misconduct in the U.S. Court system is a disgrace. Big business harms the small guy intentionally, and payoffs become a big question within the system. 3. Thomas J. Rodeffer This is a typical example of how corrupt the Judicial system here in the U.S. is! There is no justice for the lay person who is the back-bone of the tax-base! 3923 Ryan Drive, SW 2. George Edward McDermott United States District Court Judge should be removed from office for committing treason against the Constitution and fraud against the court. For denying due p
Agree Ideas are worth a dime unless successfully implemented.
So how do i make sure my idea is has not been implemented before (I know there is a remote possiblity of this ) since every idea cant be inspired or wil have some similarity but just to avoid a situation in which all ur hard works goes waste.
Also has Slashdot become like other places like digg.com where if you a re power user or more posts from you will allow you to have your post approved easily. Bcz i posted something similar and it never got approved. Mailed the support guy , he never replied back.
Idea4gud.
Vanity, vanity, all is vanity; thus saith the Preacher.
What has been done, shall be again done, and there is nothing new under the sun.
There is no remembrance of former things; nor shall those who come after remember things as they are today.
Feel free to keep your ideas to yourself...
apparently not obvious to some, look at the top companies of the world that have set up digs at or near leading educational institutions. Creating work under the historical guise of "internships", often low paid and low risk, but also a way to identify, harvest ideas and unique and valuable skills, likely before the school or even the student realizes the (dollar) potential.
Where Milo is talking to the Gates analog. Gates pursuades Milo to the dark side away from open source because of people getting rich off other people's ideas.
I always looked at it as "great, my ideas will make the world a better place, any theft of them only advances my agenda". And as a Buddhist, I am really into that.
But then I'm also a realist. But only if I can gain from my ideas, can I support myself and my family. True Buddhists are ok begging. I am not. So there is some level of greed that enters in - you don't have to want more than reliable shelter and food, but it is there. The problem is, the multimillion dollar universities will not contribute to your shelter or food supply if you let them steal your ideas.
Lets face it, while information should be free, we need to still survive, pay our bills, and advance our own agendas.
Slashdot's rate-of-post filter: Preventing you from posting too many great ideas at once.
Had the same problem at my university for my senior design project. I worked for just under a year on the project, and according to the university to get credit I had to submit the full source of the project upon turning it in. I didn't like this since I planned to use it to start a business, and by policy of the university they would own full control. So what i did was simply ask for the professors to give me rights to my project. They signed a waiver, and so long as i outlined the project in detail with providing a compiled working version were ok with that. In the end i turned in a 76 page project report, my compiled code, and some powerpoints. That was it, they published the report in the library, filed with a CD of my project, and I own complete control of the source. Win win just by asking. Always be paranoid that no matter what you build at the college on their computers is owned by them unless you ask for it. Most are completely willing to give you the credit and sign away the rights if you just bring it to them first.
If you have to ask, then your idea probably isn't that great.
At my first university, everything we did was our own. At my current university, it all belongs to them. So you have to ask your institution.
A very good protection is actually the GPL. As long as you are the copyright holder of your source code/ other material, GPL it. Java code for example is always decompilable (obfuscating is pants, really), and python is distributed as source, so is ruby and javascript. Unless you're a real coding wizard, code is not that valuable anyway. And if someone steals it, you are protected. You can relicense it later anyway, have a look at QT.
On second thought, let's not go to Camelot. It is a silly place.
All I can say is that if we do go down that path, I guarantee that it will be a poorer profession for all of us - except the patent attorneys, I guess.
That is, actually, precisely what this ends up being about. A Programmer, or Geneticist, or Bridge Engineer, or what have you comes up with an idea - maybe even implements it. But they're not living in a vaccuum.
There are people out there who will convince you that you can make money off of pure ideas, or if you properly copyright or protect your work you can make money off that. What they're really doing is simply working on the implementation of their own idea; namely, making money off of the interface of whatever you're thinking or doing and their own sphere of expertise - say, patent attorney-ship.
Further, it distracts you from what ought to be the real prize; doing something cool. I'm not saying that you should work for free, to the contrary you should take the value from things as you see the opportunity to do so. But if your focus is on building simple wealth, there are easier and arguably better ways to do it than trying to think up an idea and enter a world of marketing, litigation and all that. Figure out how much wealth you need to do the things you want. Then forget about it, because beyond that point it doesn't help you.
[Ego]out
The odds are very good that you're SOL on this issue. By entering a class as a paid student, you're likely giving up rights to any original work you present to the university (i.e. projects, presentations, assignments, etc.). It's pretty standard, and not very different than employment contracts that the rest of us have to sign in order to get a paycheque.
So if you voluntarily signed over rights to ideas, they're not being "stolen" from you at all. Welcome to grown-up life.
"People who do stupid things with hazardous materials often die." -- Jim Davidson on alt.folklore.urban
do all the work on your own hardware... testing and all. or at least don't do any work that's logged on school hardware. that way the school can't claim that you couldn't have completed the project, and developed the idea, without access to their labs and materials.
and don't turn in anything functional as a school assignment if you think you might want to patent it later--just in case. if you manage to program some "big new thing"... you can always just write some other program that'll get you an A+, and save your big idea for use later.
don't even share it with anyone till it's patented! i know it's exciting, but if it's not patented somebody else could run off and patent it. and even if you could prove it was yours, it would require money and time in court.
hell, you could always get your parents or another trusted family member to patent it in their name so your school can't steal it in the first place!
OK, so I'm half way through this thread and the obvious common theme is "ideas are a dime a dozen, execution is what counts". ... would you care to share some of your best-but-worthless ideas, those you don't have the time/money/motivation/whatever to execute, with us so that we can execute them if we so choose/desire/can? Turn it into a new "Ask Slashdot" referring to this one and let's see what you got!
Fair enough. So
One of the great lessons you need to learn from life is that your chances of ever having an original thought are vanishingly close to zero.
The chances of you being able to *act* on your thoughts - or the thoughts of others - are up to you.
"And the meaning of words; when they cease to function; when will it start worrying you?"
User maintains more than a dozen sockpuppet accounts on Slashdot.
Every student talks about their story ideas like they're some sort of brilliant trade secret. But over the course of the semester, two things always become obvious:
1) The story ideas they thought were worthy of stealing almost always sucked on an epic level.
2) Even if their ideas didn't suck, their writing skills are so mediocre that it's very unlikely they would be able to articulate said ideas into any publishable form anyway.
I've encountered hundreds of students who THOUGHT their ideas were worth a damn, but maybe only a dozen who may have been right.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
no one in their right mind is going to take an idea from somebody attending SUU.
I know this post will never see the light of day, but having been in this situation before I feel the need to add my input. First and foremost, if you turn an "idea", method, algorithm, etc. in for an assignment, you have turned over rights for that object to the university/institution. The same holds true for any insights gain while doing research funded by or using resources provided through a university.
One other thing most people don't realize when thinking about their "own" academic work is that it is plagiarism to use that work again. For example, I write an essay on the Great Depression for an economics class. I cannot use that same work for a history class without committing plagiarism.
The problem is that you receive tuition, and the whole idea sharing and rights issue is AFAIK not properly defined.
So, if you come up with something clever, mail it to yourself as the above poster suggests to date it and then speak to a lawyer. You may already be screwed. A comparable situation exists if you work at a company. Unless you have matters specifically excluded all your ideas during your employment belong to your employer, relevant to your job or not. Only if you can prove you entered employment with the ideas already established you stand a chance, but even then there can be claim that your employer provided the resources to mature the ideas.
Alternative option: get a number of people you REALLY trust to develop it further. Contracts may be a problem, however, as they will too date the idea and thus where you were..
Your ideas are not as brilliant as you think they are.
stealin ur ideaz
Some code I'll write at home in my own time without requesting time off or over time pay and that way I consider it mine.
Perhaps my plan isn't 100% full proof but then again I haven't reinvented the wheel yet either so I don't see myself getting into a huge legal battle over my ways.
I like the concept of you're program, but I'm curious as to what it's applications are? Very neat concept, but I read the FAQ but it didn't really describe what purpose the program served. I'd love to find out what your clients use it for.
Invent something world-changing first then worry about it, as the chances are it will never happen.
Bottom line: if you invent something world-changing then don't tell anyone at school.
Then decide to either quit your course or wait till your course is over before you capitalise on your idea.
Don't ever admit to anyone you even had the original idea during the time you were at school. It all happened after you left.
in 1994 or so, i wrote a business thesis in a class called entrepreneur 101, the idea was to use the fledgling internet to backup data from business's each night to an offsite location . . . my professor of this small midwestern university gave me a C+ said it was undoable, and then went out and started the company with 2 friends . . .they lasted a few years and were replaced by bigger fish . . but WTF? . . .I could have at least gotten an A
Just keep on publishing it!
Most patented stuff just and up in a drawer at organisations and you are not allowed to use your ideas yourself... if they have been published, they can't put it in a drawer or demand ransom money from you.
Here's a university. It has a library full of past projects, and thesis. It can do what it wants with them once students leave.
Outside is a dumpster with the word LIFE written on it. This is what students get when they leave. Go figure.
I'm still curious why you didn't go for that other famous Demo trick of time & usage limited. (Unless those are too easy to hack? But that again says something in the MetaThread.)
(My memory failed me - it was sound saving that was disabled.)
However, I did do a quick test on a 3866k-ish mp3, and it came out as a 823k jpeg. A 4.7X space savings might be useful for something like a phone. However, I am not an audiophile enough to know what the equivalent quality loss would be in a standard audio export program.
Feature question for you:
You know that WebPages run on Pictures, whereas sound files are kinda "blobs". Do you have any plans to be able to visually make the image file the same as the song, so that a webpage would literally show the music? I think they would make pretty backgrounds too.
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
I just realized - Please include support to handle rotations, and let your web widget play downward.
(Please mods, don't hurt me for being hopelessly offtopic!)
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
University admissions committees in general are fairly poor at keeping track of paperwork. When the university forgets to give you your housing application and other welcome materials, just don't remind them about that paper that says your ideas belong to them.
It worked for me :)
Here is your question: would you sponsor someone to develop something that they keep? If you are not the US government or someone giving money away, the answer is no. If your britches are big enough that you can fund yourself, then you can keep what you create. The school is under no obligation to share their resources with you and in return for access to professors, lab equipment, library, computer network, they want to keep what you create while using their resources.
One option is that you can go to another school if you like. Most of them probably have the same clause. Another option is to self-educate and then you are not depending upon an institution to "fund" your "ah-ha" moment.
I don't understand why people argue about contracts. Don't sign them if you don't agree with them. Don't sabotage your side of a contract if you decide a contract is not in your favor - you signed it. Best thing to do, if you have integrity, is to try and renegotiate the contract or break it and pay the consequences for early termination. Would you think things should be different if you were in the driver's seat of a contract?
Raymond Scott, jazz composer and inventor, was VERY protective of his ideas. Many of his best ones he took to his grave. Consequently, he's known for his music and not for his inventions.
Moral: If someone steals your ideas, you should consider it a complement and thank them.
we are beaming your ideas straight from your mind, and you can't stop us! BWAHAHAHAHAHA
Something which has not appeared to have been mentioned thus far is that if you are doing a project at a university, that means you are using resources (ie. computers, labs, access to professors and other staff, advice from supervisors etc) of that university. Universities shouldn't have to do all of this for free, they're usually pretty starved of funds as it is, and if they are legitimately contributing to the development of a project, then they may legitimately have a claim to part of it. We're all part of a bigger system. Good ideas are rarely the work of one individual in isolation.
What he is referring to is the Bayh-Dole Act, which allows the University, and in some cases his professors or even outside corporate parties, to patent his ideas and profit from them without his permission.
This has absolutely nothing to do with an inventor patenting inventions in the "outside" world.
...just include GPLed code. You're creating a working product, not necessarily a copyrightable one. There are TONS of libraries you could use to get this protection. It's how professors do it.
ur question is revealing the max. threshold value to hold "Free market" true....
but if u wanna be stable.....u'd better open it...let ppl coop with ur ideas....so all can benefit while u get ur own credit being the creator..
if not, u close ur idea.....then all guys come to steal and kill...that's no good to all....
that's why GPL and GNU/Linux has been growing super fast....becoz all guys r coop-ing in one thing....that other side has been doing for so many decades.....
the only difference....open OR close
If you are really concerned, you should talk to a lawyer.
The school can only claim your work if it was done using their resources. So don't use their resource where ever possible.
First of all, do all your editing of all code on your own computer. If possible test and debug it there too. There are many free compilers and shells available for bsd and linux and windows (using cygwin.)
Add a copyright notice to everything you write with a statement saying that the entire work was written on your own machine using your own resources.
Write the same statement and copyright notice on any homework or tests that you turn in.
OP should study Creation-evolution controversy. This would enhance his horizon.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Creation-evolution_controversy
I'd like to buy homeland for our 10 million people. http://twitter.com/mahadiga
You make it too complicated.
All the guy has to do is publish all his assignments on the web before he hands them in.
That way the ideas are all public domain before the university can steal them.
Simple.
I am anarch of all I survey.
Your ideas are being stolen. Not only don't tell anyone what they are, don't even think about them. Hidden in the walls of your dorm are dream snatchers which are recording and patenting every thought you have. Don't think this is a joke or you will regret not taking this extremely important advice.
Nothing is stolen from you. You signed away your rights when you agreed to attend their school. It is no different than when an employee at a company develops an idea using company resources- the employee has signed an employment agreement that says such ideas are company property.
read the fine print...
Especially undergrads. I've remembered for years now the way their shiny faces fell when they came to explicate their new and brilliant insight, and I, as the grumpy grad student, had to point out that their idea was originally published more than 100 years ago, and had been in and out of fashion ever since. It was not really an "idea" in the useful sense at all. Just an obvious speculation that a little thought would show could not be verified since there really wasn't anything substantive that was unique to it. Ah the blank looks when asked for the empirical content of their "brilliant insight."
...everything "new" is just an evolution of previous ideas, usually discovered in the 50s or 60s. So, don't worry much about it.
I eventually realized that a "one in a million" idea or trait seems really unique to most of us, but that with 6 Billion people, that means one thousand other people had the same exact idea. That's now, and if you count the people who died already, it's even more humbling. All you can do is compete against the ones who will have your idea tomorrow, and try to outrun a person who had the idea yesterday. Fortunately, patent and trademark laws are designed to be so expensive that you don't have to worry about the people in India and China and Africa and South America who have the same idea and are smarter than you, as they cannot afford the patent process. Your challenge is to capitalize it (like Alain says) and make enough money to sue those guys when they "steal" their own idea, or the 100,000 others that didn't have the idea to begin with and steal it from all of you. It's called the gray market.
Gently reply
Only copied.
at university you just don't publish or use your top ideas. Collect & use them when you graduate. In working life it's more complicated as employment contracts have clauses abut these things, but if you document well that you had the idea before or that you created it on your own time you can cover yourself. Also if the idea has nothing to do with the company's main business or tech they can't argue you invented it during working hours.
The NYT article misses the real story: the lesson being taught to these students is that solving a social problem and trying to help people in developing countries is an opportunity to make money. Lets recap. The professor set an assignment that students create a design that would solve a social problem. The students wanted to help reduce environmental degradation and to help people in developing countries build their own houses. They produced one design for their assignment. They weren't happy with it so they continued working on it. Their motivation for continuing working on the problem? It seems their motivation was to solve an interesting design challenge and to help people in the developing world. They weren't motivated in this instance by a desire to make money, and they certainly weren't motivated by a desire to make money for the universities technology transfer office. The lesson they have learned; the desire to help people and solve social problems can be exploited to make money. I've explained how this makes the idea unlikely to be used in a blogpost http://aliquidnovi.org/?p=160
apart from being a troll, I was suggesting that you talk about it during reasearch as well as when it's being developed etc... they won't be able to get a parent if it's not a secret.
thank God the internet isn't a human right.
You mean limiting the running time of the program to like 5 or 10 minutes? Well, I for one hate these sort of time-based limitations, plus it's a program that's trivial to relaunch and reload what you were doing, mainly considered you can save the result to an image.
As for the compression, I think the lowest you could go to obtain a sub-POTS quality that would be barely intelligible would be an image 42 pixels high, with a width determined by duration (in seconds) * 30 pixels, or in other words 1,260 pixels/second. Which would mean you could put more than 6 minutes of sound in the equivalent of a 800x600 image, and if you were to use the JPG compression for that I guess you'd obtain something like 70-100 kB? So you'd obtain something like 2 kbps. It would sound awful though.
I'm really really not sure what you meant by that question about, webpages, pictures and music, sorry.. do you mean something like a Firefox extension to play pictures?
You just got troll'd!
Signed,
Al Gore
If it's a really good idea, drop out of school, start a business, make a million off it. If it's not a good idea, you don't care if they take it.
I would get a copy of your schools Ts and As... you likely already signed your ideas away... Google Teddy Ruxpin and DeVry.... File under sucks to be you :(
Hi there.
This is a sample page I whipped based on my previous template.
http://taophoenix.exofire.net/Comp/CompIntro.html
The "Computer Monk" picture takes you to the next webpage, but the dark background graphic - surprise! - turns out to be a playable music song!
It would be neat if you had a "drag and drop" variant of your photosounder so if someone is browsing a webpage they can save a song image, then right away drag it onto your "mini photosounder" without opening the full strength program, because they just want to play the song, not do havy modifications on it.
re: rotation, recall that webpages "scroll down". So I would turn the picture sideways as a page background. When saved, photosounder should have an option to attempt to rotate before playing. (Otherwise it is gibberish).
I am close to purchasing, but it would be nice to see these and a couple other finesses.
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
I'm definitely going to implement drag-and-drop in Photosounder because often do I find myself thinking it would be much simpler if I could open file just by dropping the onto the window when I'm browsing for files. However I'm still not sure I understand what your idea is... you want to gave songs as images on your webpage, that people would listen to by opening them with a "mini photosounder"? Would that be a standalone program that would be like the full thing except minus a bunch of stuff, and you would require people who visit your webpage to have a copy of it to listen to it? I'm not sure I get the idea hehe.
You just got troll'd!
You already ansered the question! Let me just invert the order of your post.
"... you want to gave songs as images on your webpage, that people would listen to by opening them with a "mini photosounder"? "
is met by
"I'm definitely going to implement drag-and-drop in Photosounder because often do I find myself thinking it would be much simpler if I could open file just by dropping the onto the window when I'm browsing for files."
1. RightClick/Save Image
2. Drag Image onto MiniSounder and play!
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
it says almost exactly what i said... to quote: ". 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. "
Actually I think it's possible that you could directly drag the image straight from the browser onto the Photosounder window, once drag and drop is implemented :).
You just got troll'd!
A small hat made from aluminum foil and a roll of duct tape is what i use. So far I have had no problems.
Jamey Kirby
The parent poster is absolutely right. Ideas are a dime a dozen. Getting off your rear to implement them is the hard part.