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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
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.
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.
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.
Don't share your brilliant ideas in class projects. You don't need to submit something novel or patentable for a school project.
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.
Are my ideas being stolen?
Is my mind being raped?
My intellect is being as****ked.
And now my ears they really gape.
(Like goatse, like goatse......)
"City hall" in German is "Rathaus" Kinda explains a few things......
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
In "The Zen of Graphics Programming", Michael Abrash (a co-author of Quake and inventor of Mode X) wrote:
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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..."
I understand the "places of work" because they paid me money. But, if the universities has the right to my work, then I have the right to be paid minimal wage for my time for both the good and bad ideas I develop. Tim S
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
I assume you mean the school's endowment by "hoarding large pools of cash" -- in most cases, the schools are not allowed to touch the cash itself, only the interest/dividends off it. And while tuition is going up, most of those same schools are using endowment money to fund scholarships, so that relatively few students are actually paying full tuition. (To some extent, I suspect that this is a shell game. To qualify as a non-profit, they have to spend most of that interest, and the endowment rules frequently are strict about what it can be used for, but paying themselves "tuition" on behalf of a student lets them move money around and spend it on salaries and infrastructure)
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.
...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
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.
Well, I've identified 3 main uses. First one is to create original sound effects from images. You can hear what sort of thing you can obtain with it by listening to the flash mp3 player in the upper right corner of the site. A second use is as an audio editor, to apply all sorts of effects to it, like suppressing certain sounds, stretching it, transposing, and, since the recent addition of an image exporting feature (which is available in the demo too), all the kinds of things you can do in Photoshop, that is, wrapping, blurring, contrast, precise isolation of sound features/instruments, or anything else that could be imagined...
A third type of use, which I consider the most interesting yet the most underrated, is the creation of sounds from images, using real sounds as a reference to learn how sounds look as images, and produce similar images to obtain similar sounds, and then improving upon that to get something truly unique, like your very own unique musical instruments. I'm currently in the process of creating a full drum kit entirely create this way, by "drawing" each of them from scratch, for demonstration purposes, which, when is done, I will distribute freely. I have already a video on YouTube demonstrating how to create a full drum beat this way, but the individual drum sounds created for this video are very basic and simple, much more sophisticated types of sounds can be created, which is the very reason I started this project in the first place, to be able to create music in a much freer and more flexible way. The basic idea is, if any sound can be represented as an image, then you could make images that represent any sound you want, be they familiar sounds or very novel sounds.
You just got troll'd!