[game_edu] Student IP Ownership

[Dan Rosenthal]

In any case, the moral of the story is to simply have some sort of agreement expressly defining any assignments of IP rights or any work for hire agreements.  Even if there are none, and the agreement is simply to say "Students retain all, University has no part in this", it makes things significantly more clear, and besides: it's good practice anyway for the students to be getting into the habit of thinking about their IP rights from the very beginning of an undertaking. Better they get a brief primer on things now, rather than 10 years down the line in the middle of an infringement action. (As a side note, this was the reasoning behind my IP primer in Ian's Game Design Concepts course from ...last year I believe?).

-Dan

On Jul 14, 2010, at 7:01 PM, Ian Schreiber wrote:


> 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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