During the past two years, I have negotiated with my alma matter (MIT) over intellectual property rights. One of the issues was the right to the source code that I wrote as a part of my thesis. I had already put the source code in the public domain, so the need for a software license turned out to be a moot point. Below is a summary of what I learned about student IP rights during this process:
1) If you pay tutition the university is only entitled to shop rights. If you use someone's facility to create an invention, you own the invention but the person who owns the facilty is entitled to practice the invention, but they do not own it, and they cannot sublicense it.
2) If your tution money is adminstered by the university things get very grey. Some universities claim that since they are "paying you" they own all the rights. I have obtained legal advice from mulitple sources that assure me such claims would not stand up in court for several reasons:
i) Contractual. In my case, and that of many students at MIT, there was no intellectual property agreement signed upon adminssion. However, the Technology licensing office asked me to sign one when I went in aa spoke to them. This is considered a contract without compensation (one side is giving up something, and the other is not) and is not a valid contract. In fact it is illegal for an employer to attempt to do this, without offering additional compensation to the employee. If your school asks you to sign one of these (except at adminssion as a condition for attending the univesity), you should refuse, you are under no legal obligatin to sign it.
ii) There is a legal notion of a reasonable wage, and if you are not paid a reasonable wage they employer cannot attach intellectual propoerty claims. Grad student stipends are not even close to being a reasonable wage for a person with a B.S.and M.S. degrees in engineering.
iii) The bottom line is the school is being paid for you to be there, they may administer the money, but the money comes from some other comapny, non-profit or government agency. If it comes from the government, the IP rights are governed by the Bayh-Dole Act. This has many ramifications, which are beyond the scope of this post, but you should be aware that the high level goal of the Act was to to insure the public benefits from government sponsored research. While the conventional thinking here is that the way to do this is through commercialization, I think FSF and the Linux community provide a compelling argument for open source, public domain software being of tremendous benefit to the public.
Even though I started a company based on my thesis work, I decided to put the software in the public domain, becasue I felt it would benefit the research community as I had benefited from so much other code. In addition, I filed a patent on the hardware architecture, because I thought I needed protection to start a company. In retrospect, it wasn't necessary and I wish I hadn't done it (but that's another story).
I have spoken to many people at different universities, who are all in a similar situation. Basically univesities have felt left out of the dot-com explosion, and want to get a piece of the financial pie, so they are aggressively going after IP. The risk they run is poisoning the open university atmoshpere which is critical to the generation of such ideas, and in the process alienating future alumni, who may feel less inclined to donate in the future.
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During the past two years, I have negotiated with my alma matter (MIT) over intellectual property rights. One of the issues was the right to the source code that I wrote as a part of my thesis. I had already put the source code in the public domain, so the need for a software license turned out to be a moot point. Below is a summary of what I learned about student IP rights during this process:
1) If you pay tutition the university is only entitled to shop rights. If you use someone's facility to create an invention, you own the invention but the person who owns the facilty is entitled to practice the invention, but they do not own it, and they cannot sublicense it.
2) If your tution money is adminstered by the university things get very grey. Some universities claim that since they are "paying you" they own all the rights. I have obtained legal advice from mulitple sources that assure me such claims would not stand up in court for several reasons:
i) Contractual. In my case, and that of many students at MIT, there was no intellectual property agreement signed upon adminssion. However, the Technology licensing office asked me to sign one when I went in aa spoke to them. This is considered a contract without compensation (one side is giving up something, and the other is not) and is not a valid contract. In fact it is illegal for an employer to attempt to do this, without offering additional compensation to the employee. If your school asks you to sign one of these (except at adminssion as a condition for attending the univesity), you should refuse, you are under no legal obligatin to sign it.
ii) There is a legal notion of a reasonable wage, and if you are not paid a reasonable wage they employer cannot attach intellectual propoerty claims. Grad student stipends are not even close to being a reasonable wage for a person with a B.S.and M.S. degrees in engineering.
iii) The bottom line is the school is being paid for you to be there, they may administer the money, but the money comes from some other comapny, non-profit or government agency. If it comes from the government, the IP rights are governed by the Bayh-Dole Act. This has many ramifications, which are beyond the scope of this post, but you should be aware that the high level goal of the Act was to to insure the public benefits from government sponsored research. While the conventional thinking here is that the way to do this is through commercialization, I think FSF and the Linux community provide a compelling argument for open source, public domain software being of tremendous benefit to the public.
Even though I started a company based on my thesis work, I decided to put the software in the public domain, becasue I felt it would benefit the research community as I had benefited from so much other code. In addition, I filed a patent on the hardware architecture, because I thought I needed protection to start a company. In retrospect, it wasn't necessary and I wish I hadn't done it (but that's another story).
I have spoken to many people at different universities, who are all in a similar situation. Basically univesities have felt left out of the dot-com explosion, and want to get a piece of the financial pie, so they are aggressively going after IP. The risk they run is poisoning the open university atmoshpere which is critical to the generation of such ideas, and in the process alienating future alumni, who may feel less inclined to donate in the future.