[game_edu] Student IP Ownership

[Gregory Walek]

It's not illegal for the school to retain IP if there's a signed document. DigiPen has students sign a document saying they understand that IP rights to all of their work are owned by the school. The Guildhall @ SMU, which I'm alum of, does this as well. I'd like to note that I do not want this to turn into a demonization of schools that do this. They have their justifications for doing so. Digipen is notorious about this because they regularly get projects which could have had legs but instead refuse to sell or negotiate with students for rights to monitize. 
 
Portal's genesis comes from one of these projects. The difference here, and what Digipen Admin are telling new students, is that The Narbacular drop team did not take any of the code or other assets when they went to Valve. What you see in Portal was built from scratch and all new. 

Please do remember: IP rights does not cover gameplay concepts.



-----Original Message-----
From: game_edu-bounces at igda.org on behalf of Jose P. Zagal
Sent: Fri 7/16/2010 12:55 PM
To: IGDA Game Education Listserv
Subject: Re: [game_edu] Student IP Ownership
 



> 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


It probably would be unless there was some prior agreement that said the 
opposite.



>

> 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.


Again, that would depend on what prior agreements there are.

DigiPen is notorious for this, in fact, and as far as I know they 
haven't been sued yet.

(more on this issue here:
http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/3849/controversy_in_the_classroom_.php)




>

> 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.



Valve hired (some, but not all?) of the DigiPen students that worked on 
Narbacular Drop who then went on to develop Portal. Arguably the game 
mechanic is the same, but both games are different. They essentially 
built the game from scratch without using anything from the student 
version. DigiPen would be hard pressed to claim infringement. (I believe 
there's a Portal post-mortem that discusses some of this). Interestingly 
enough, a few years later Valve hired (some, but not all?) of the 
students to worked on "Tag" (IGF 2009) and some of the mechanics from 
that student game seem to have made their way into Portal 2.

Other than DigiPen, does any game school/program claim ownership of 
student work? (if it's the only one, that would be another reason not to 
claim ownership).


Jose Zagal



>

> - Ian

>

>

>

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