[game_edu] Student IP Ownership

[Philip Tan]

For classwork, student-owned IP is definitely the way to go. Right now, all
my classes have the IP co-owned between all the students who worked on it.
This does have the downside in that no one can do anything with it unless
all the creators agree. Given that my classes have small teams (3-4 people
max), though, it's quite manageable.

I can't remember if it's CMU or USC that had a variant for larger team
projects, but I recall one instructor explaining to me that they have the
students negotiate among themselves at the beginning of the project. They
may divide ownership by percentages, or segregate ownership between those
who are basically doing it for the credit, and those who will take it
further after the class. This way, this establishes an understanding among
all the team members that some people will be more invested in the work than
others. This helps preempt situations where the ones crunching 80 hours a
week get upset at the ones who are doing the required 12 hours for credit.

I'm going to introduce a wrinkle - when the students are being paid by the
department for their development work. That's a really common arrangement in
our lab. In that case, the students are actually hired by the university,
and the IP belongs to the university.

This has to be backed up by other agreements: every hour the student works
must be paid. In exchange, our students agree not to work additional hours
without staff approval. To meet these constraints, we have to cut features
pretty brutally, so that we have something usable at the end of the
semester. Crunch is not a viable option. Finally, the university must be
willing to either put resources into further developing/using the IP, or be
willing to license the IP back to the students if it doesn't plan to do
anything else with it. The university can't just sit on it like a dog in a
manger.

The metric I use is "who's paying?" If it's class, the students are paying
tuition, so the student(s) own the IP. If it's a research internship, the
university is paying, so the university owns the IP. Sometimes, grant
funders also will demand joint ownership... which will vary from contract to
contract.
----
Philip Tan
Singapore-MIT GAMBIT Game Lab


On Wed, Jul 14, 2010 at 11:27 AM, Gregory Walek <gwalek at ccsnh.edu> wrote:


> I'm working on establishing IP rules regarding student work created in

> our department.

>

> What I'm looking for:

> * Examples where students retain rights to monetize their work.

> * Examples on how to deal with IP ownership when work is created in

> team.

>

> This is what I'm not looking for:

> * A discussion of who retains rights and why. I've already have a goal

> and trying to target it.

> * Examples of where the school retains all rights on the work. (As most

> graduate schools do.)

> * Art school examples (such as studio commission policies) do not help

> me.

>

>

> A tangent of this issue, has the Education Sig worked on any of these

> issues yet? Do we have a collection of policies \ types of policies that

> exist.

>

>

> Gregory Walek

> NHTI AGGP

>

>

> _______________________________________________

> game_edu mailing list

> game_edu at igda.org

> http://seven.pairlist.net/mailman/listinfo/game_edu

>

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://seven.pairlist.net/pipermail/game_edu/attachments/20100714/3136544e/attachment.html>