[game_edu] Student IP Ownership

[Ian Schreiber]

Hi Jose,


>Your email also asked for the rationale for allowing students to own 



>their work:


Actually, I think this is something Gregory specifically said he was NOT asking 
for, but it's still probably of interest :)

There's one important reason you left off of your list: assuming the students 
are doing work as part of a class that they're paying for, it is probably 
illegal for the school to claim ownership. See, for example:
http://archives.igda.org/columns/lastwords/lastwords_Nov08.php

As Philip says, if your students are getting paid by the school through a 
research grant that's one thing, but it would be an incredible stretch to say 
that student-made work for a class is owned by the school (even though some 
schools have tried, apparently on the theory that the students won't know any 
better). I'm just waiting for the day when some school tries to pull the old "we 
haz ur IP" trick only to get sued by the students, because I strongly suspect 
the school will lose badly.

As for the original post:

> 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.


ThatGameCompany (flOw) and 2DBoy (World of Goo) seem like prototypical examples 
of students monetizing their work. 


Additionally, Portal is a special case because the original idea was made by a 
team... at a school that claims it owns student-created IP... that was then 
monetized by a game studio. So I have absolutely no idea how the legal ownership 
of that worked, but I bet it was interesting.

- Ian



      
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