
Who Owns Your Great Idea? - robg
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/04/education/edlife/whoseidea-t.html?ref=edlife
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noonespecial
We need to think carefully here about the difference between a freshman in a
design class who thinks up "a water bottle that can be filled with sand and
stacked into a house", and a graduate student's wireless biomedical monitor
that required thousands of hours of lab time and clinical trials to develop.

Any system that treats both of these the same way is going to generate copious
amounts of absurdity.

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Tangurena
Inventors get screwed by corporations and now by universities. The bit about
MIT demanding royalties from the inventor was nasty but expected. But when RPI
was demanding royalties even though they had zero input in creating the "idea"
and supplied nothing towards inventing it, is outrageous to me.

~~~
russell
I wonder if RPI had any legal standing at all. The students weren't employees
and they probably hadn't signed any agreements assigning inventions to RPI. In
the case of Page and Brin mentioned above, as graduate students, they probably
were employees of Stanford.

My son, when he was an undergrad at UC Berkeley, go so ticked off at these
policies that he always put copyright notices on his homework assignments.

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drinian
_Colleges and universities obtained fewer than 250 patents a year before 1980,
when the Bayh-Dole Act gave them ownership of inventions developed through
federally financed research._

I'm torn about when this should be considered a good thing.

------
iseff
Stanford owns the patent for PageRank. Seems to have worked out well for Larry
and Sergey.

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jackowayed
I think that's fair, really. The University is like your angel investor. It
helps you fine-tune the idea by giving you labs. It helps you get the patent.
And they get a cut so they can support similar people in the future.

~~~
edb
the difference being that _you_ pay _them_. Give me free education and labs
(paid by the university, not the state) and the university can have a huge cut
of all my ideas.

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Red_Hen
The Bayh Dole act is used as a bulldozer to run over University professors but
it actually doesn't say anything about a faculty members obligation to assign
his rights to a university receiving federal funds.

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vaksel
Does anyone know if there was ever a case of a university suing to enforce a
patent it holds?

~~~
zandorg
Eolas and Microsoft? Eolas was part owned by a University.

