[game_edu] Student IP for coursework

[Ben Chang]

As faculty we mostly take the approach that students own their own IP, 
and have them work out agreements within their teams at the beginning of 
classes.  Even if they're not starting off planning on doing anything 
more with a game beyond the course assignment, it's good for them to 
discuss it just in case.  For the groups that go on into our incubator 
or other entrepreneurship programs, we approach it as a "founder's 
agreement."

I'd love to have some templates and examples to give to students as a 
model; by and large we're asking them to work out equitable terms among 
themselves just kind of starting from scratch with minimal knowledge of 
contract law, and it can be intimidating or create extra friction.  My 
dream would be to have a starter pack to hand out at freshman 
orientation; when we have students releasing games in their first and 
second year already, they need to know this stuff early.

 From an /institute/ standpoint, our IP policy is heavily geared toward 
patentable inventions, and involves our office of technology 
commercialization really early on to determine whether the university 
has (or wants) an ownership claim.  There's a lot of emphasis on 
documentation and reporting right from the beginning, which makes sense 
for patents because you want to be able to document the date of 
invention and the idea is that the university is likely in a better 
position to defend a patent.

In the case where the school does want to assert ownership, they then 
assign the student full rights to commercialize the invention. A small 
license percentage kicks in once the student's annual revenue from the 
invention exceed some fairly large threshold.

Games are in a bit of a grey area around the interpretation of the term 
'significant use of university resources' for determining whether the 
university would try to assert an interest in the IP, but in practice 
this hasn't been an issue at all.  In the incubator / accelerator 
programs for example we're explicit that participants still own the IP 
the companies they're creating.   For long-term projects where the 
school is really involved in organizing, funding, or managing the 
project I would look at doing something formal with the school for 
ownership.

-ben



On 8/24/17 9:38 AM, Ian Schreiber via game_edu wrote:
> Question for those of you who teach courses that involve the creation 
> of games that may go on to be commercialized, submitted to festivals, 
> or similar (e.g. capstone courses):
>
> What do you do, if anything, involving student ownership of IP? Do you 
> have them sign a contract as part of the syllabus (and if so, what's 
> in the contract and how did you put it together)? How do you handle 
> cases where some of the student team might want to take the game 
> forward and others would not? How do you deal with crediting and 
> ownership in the case of students who are low performers, or who are 
> late adds or late drops (or who contribute to the project peripherally 
> even though they're not taking the course, e.g. a student whose 
> roommate provides some art on their own time)? And... how much of this 
> is covered by university or department policy, vs. how much is 
> entirely up to you as the instructor?
>
> Just at my own institution it seems like there's no standard, every 
> professor handles this differently, so I'm interested to hear what 
> others have done in this space.
>
> - Ian
>
>
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-- 
Benjamin Chang
Associate Professor, Department of the Arts
Director, Games and Simulation Arts and Sciences
Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute
110 8th Street, Troy, NY 12180
changb3 at rpi.edu
518.276.2366

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