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IP Rights For Games Made In School?
Posted by
Soulskill
on Sat Nov 15, 2008 02:57 PM
from the share-and-share-alike dept.
from the share-and-share-alike dept.
Gamasutra has a story questioning whether schools should be able to hold intellectual property rights on games created by students. The point out a recent incident in which a development team was unable to market a game they created, and another situation where a school overrode the creator's decision to withdraw the game from a contest.
"What irks Aikman is that, after graduating, he and his team approached DigiPen, hoping it might change its policy and make an exception for the award-winning game, but the school wouldn't budge. 'They were dead set on not setting a precedent because, if they let us keep the IP, they were afraid other students would want the same. But I believe there's something wrong with the idea of DigiPen owning games it has no intention of doing anything with, while discouraging people like me who could really make use of our efforts and use it as a springboard to a career.'"
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Schools - A distorted reality (Score:5, Interesting)
--
So who is hotter? Ali or Ali's Sister?
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Schools play by their own rules regardless of how the world works. I view universities as a service I pay for. Therefore anything I create at a university (unless employed to work on) should inherently become my property.
You have a distorted understanding of how the world works. When you pay for someone to do work you, you do *not* necessarily get the IP rights to that work. A notorious example is wedding photography -- you're paying for the photographer's time and a set of prints, but you do not have dup
Re:Schools - A distorted reality (Score:5, Insightful)
When you pay for someone to do work you, you do *not* necessarily get the IP rights to that work. A notorious example is wedding photography -- you're paying for the photographer's time and a set of prints, but you do not have duplication rights. Those belong to the photographer, because it's considered an artistic work, just as if you hired a famous artist to paint a scene.
You're correct, but the situation with the photographer is not analogous to the situation with a University.u When you hire a wedding photographer, the photographer creates the "IP" (the wedding photos). But in Gates82's post, when he "hires" a university, it is not the university creating the IP (a game in this topic, but could be most anything else), but him instead. There's nothing wrong with your post, but it doesn't contradict anything Gates82 wrote.
However, Gates82 also believes that if he pays all of his own tuition and fees then whatever he produces should be his. However, at a public university, some portion of every student's costs are subsidized by the state, so the state might have some interest in anything he produces even if he pays his own way.
- T
Parent
Re: (Score:2)
But in Gates82's post, when he "hires" a university, it is not the university creating the IP (a game in this topic, but could be most anything else), but him instead.
Well, it's true it's not strictly analogous, but my overall point is that assignment of IP does not automatically go where you assume it might. In the case of the University, they're obviously providing something of value, since the students are doing it within that structure, and not outside of the school. The school is providing the hardwa
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except that my schools have always REQUIRED people to do their own original work. Therefore the work should remain mine. I believe the schools opinion is that they are "directing" the work, so the work you do is "work for hire" and assigned to them. They are directing the work you do.. you wouldn't have done it without their input as an assignment. Frankly, it's a corporate-style power grab to prevent students from benefiting when corporations "donate" large amounts of money to "help" students. In the
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You have obviously never been married.
"Honey, I found a great way to save money on the wedding!"
Re:Schools - A distorted reality (Score:5, Interesting)
> Even if I use school resources to create the item (I'm paying for those services)
While I do agree with you, this point here is problematic. While you are paying for the resources, you are (almost certainly) paying for educationally licensed versions of those resources. In short, if you were to commercialize something that they could prove you created using such resources, you could be sued for breach of contract.
Further, you also neglect to consider private contributions to universities. These usually represent rather significant portions of the budget, and can exceed a billion dollars in the case of particularly prestigious schools. As a result, no school can be considered to be funded entirely by the students, meaning that the school's resources are not entirely payed for by students anyway.
That being said, unless you are being paid to be there, they almost certainly have no claim to any IP created by a student, regardless of whether it's on the student's or the "university's time" (as the latter is being paid for by the student). The only possible argument to the contrary is that the university views the potential IP produced by the a student as additional compensation for their educational services.
There are interesting questions here though, namely what exactly a student pays for as part of their education. Intriguingly, I would have to say that a student has more claim to work they do for class than that they do otherwise, as the former is obviously part of the services they are paying for. Any university assistance on the latter, however, could very well be regarded as additional, unrelated services (e.g. consulting a professor, using software, etc).
As a final note: I am unaware of any school even attempting to assert ownership of IP created by liberal arts students, such as creative writings or art portfolios, etc. There may well be some definitive precedent within that area.
Parent
Re:Schools - A distorted reality (Score:5, Insightful)
yet schools can't manage to own the text books that professors write using student intern time.... Hummmm.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Students hold the copyright for papers they write and the art they make, I don't understand how code is any different.
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So, in summary: Science/technology is more valuable than art to cash hungry universities.
This sucks. Why should science/technology students not benefit from our creativity in the same way as those in the humanities? It almost seems like a denial of the value of creative input in technological disciplines.
Well, I'm only guessing as to their motivations. It could be that they simply wish to avoid any future legal liabilities, or something else entirely. It does sound like a land-grab to me, though.
From a purely mercenary perspective, it's a lot easier to monetize a piece of useful software, or a new programming technique, that it is a student's work of art. And I agree: if the student does the work he or she should reap the benefits. As others have pointed out, depending upon the situation the school might
Re:Schools - A distorted reality (Score:4, Informative)
Well, reading the article can give a clue as to Digipen's arguments:
However, Claude Comair begs to differ. Comair, who founded the privately owned DigiPen in 1988, is its president and one of its owners. He is also a co-founder of the Nintendo Software Technology Corp., a division of Nintendo of America.
"Our policy, which has been our policy since day one and which is laid out in our student agreement, is very clear -- everything that is done within the school and presented as homework or as a product to be judged by a teacher ends up being the property of the school. IP, code, artwork, everything," says Comair.
"And, as a matter of fact, in my opening speech, I tell students that if there is something dear to them, they should not present it as homework."
That policy, Comair explains, isn't a casual one and, he feels, it has helped the school avoid many problems, especially misunderstandings between DigiPen and the games industry.
"We are not here to compete with the games industry," he says. "We are not here for people to come and make a game in a less-expensive manner utilizing equipment and software that has student licenses."
"Just as importantly, we are not equipped to properly firewall our projects in the sense that we really don't know legally speaking how many or which students created which games. We don't know whether they received input from other students who have not been credited."
"These are just a few of the reasons why we have this policy," he adds, "but the bottom line is that DigiPen has never sold any of its students' games nor do we intend to. Nor have we made any exceptions for students who tried to convince us to do so. They have come to us with so many very creative arguments that I recently had to say to them 'Please don't come anymore. I have your best interests at heart and I want you to go find good jobs after you graduate. But I simply cannot make exceptions.'"
I can understand how students attempting to monetize projects could create a lot of issues for the school. Essentially, the school would take on liability, because the games were created with their software, computers, and resources. They just can't open themselves up like that.
That being said, it's pretty obvious that Digipen is pretty permissive about allowing a company to hire all students, and create a commercial version of a student project. This is exactly what happened with Portal, and it's been a fantastic boon (in terms of publicity) for Digipen. They'd be insane to come down on the wrong side of this issue, as it would negatively affect the employment prospects of its graduates, which would ultimately hurt them.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
It would be - let us say - unusual - if your tuition and fees were covering all your school's expenses.
No less unusual if no part of that tuition was being subsidiz
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last I checked those were tax exempt DONATIONS... to charity, not investments. If schools are accepting funding for student work, then first, I expect to be paid for my work, and second, I'd expect the university to pay income tax like a business and for those tax deductions to be taken away from business contributors.
They are paying for me to learn stuff... If I happen to learn something new and novel nobody else has learned then that should be mine.
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The state subsidizes roads -- do they have an ownership stake in everything that passes over those roads?
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They certainly act like they do.
Re:Schools - A distorted reality (Score:4, Funny)
Parent
Where do I sign up? (Score:2, Funny)
I'm just askin'.
reminder about copyrights (Score:4, Insightful)
Just a reminder: it's really hard to pre-sign over copyrights to something except by being an employee of the institution in question. If these guys didn't sign a paper explicitly transferring the copyrights to the specific game then the institution doesn't own them. It might have a contract compelling them to sign the rights over. The contract might even be enforceable. But it doesn't -currently- own the copyrights.
Re:reminder about copyrights (Score:5, Interesting)
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
If they say it *is* their property, they have nothing. That's not an enforceable contract.
If they say you agree to sign it over to them, that *may* be an enforceable contract.
Don't go (Score:2)
If you want to keep your IP, don't go to a school that will take your IP. They'll drive away talent, and before long they'll be irrelevant.
Standard form contract (Score:3, Insightful)
If you want to keep your IP, don't go to a school
not cool (Score:5, Interesting)
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Re:not cool (Score:4, Interesting)
Parent
Re: (Score:2)
most schools claim ALL IP... every home work assignment, every term paper, every drawing, lab result, etc. I think in reality they do that to cover their own butts... so that if a professor reuses it, or submits it for research they can't be sued... but if that was the case they'd write the agreement like Flickr where it's non-exclusive and they clearly want the product exclusive to them.
relevant quote from article (Score:5, Insightful)
Here's from the president and founder of DigiPen:
"I am not saying that we will not change in the future," he adds. "But, in order to do that, we need to talk to the industry to see what they feel would be best. Our program advisory committee is made up of the best of the best companies in the world. So far," he says, "they are very happy with our policy."
Yeah, I'm sure there's no bias on that board whatsoever!
Permissive free software license (Score:4, Insightful)
There goes my karma... and the schools will start agreeing with Steve Ballmer [wikipedia.org] too.
Re:Permissive free software license (Score:4, Interesting)
A fun suggestion, but if a university does own the rights to your work, they could very simply disallow your contributions to be released under a given license (BSD in this case). You can't circumvent someone's ownership of something by transferring it to someone else. What you're suggesting here is the IP analogue of stealing something and claiming it's okay because you gave it to your friend (or the public; IP Robin Hood!).
Parent
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I'd agree, they will call that plagiarism. Even though the work is your own, it's not original for the specific assignment. I know that's how they view work when you re-take classes or take classes that repeat assignments.. they want you to do original work and not "clean up" a paper you wrote for another class.
This was an IGF winner (Score:3, Informative)
The article fails to mention that Synaesthete [igf.com] won $2500 at the Independent Games Festival [igf.com] at the Game Developer's Conference in 2008. I wonder where the $2500 went? To the school? To the students? I guess it should go to the school since the school owns the game right? Or did they give it to the students because it is their game?
Re: (Score:2, Informative)
Meet with them privately and make a deal (Score:2, Interesting)
They don't want to set a precedent. Fine. Make them an offer, you buy the rights to your own game, perhaps for a nominal fee like a dollar, and then all parties involved sign non-disclosure agreements as to what the terms of the agreement were. They'd be smart to try to retain some equity in the game, might be a homerun, but still. IP law doesn't exist to stop the development of good idea, but to encourage them. Were they to actually go into court and argue the former, it's hard to see how they'd win.
Not as stringent as you might think... (Score:2, Informative)
Being a digipen student myself, I have a unique perspective.
EVERY digipen student is well aware of the school's copyright policies. This happens well BEFORE any development on school games begin. As such, we know FULL well that any game or assignment we turn in is the full copyright of digipen.
HOWEVER, having discussed this at length with various professors (and heads of the game department), there are ways around this.
1) Any game you develop completely outside of digipen is yours free and clear. Provid
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except that under academic rules you are require do do your own work, not develop other's ideas. Therefore any assignment you do should legally fulfill proper assignment of copyright to YOU unless they try to take it away. Therefore you are not sharing any IP from anybody else, only resources, which you are paying steep tuition for. That doesn't really grant them enough of a claim to the IP of what you did. I don't think College fits the consideration requirements wages, benefits, vacation time, etc. tha
Don't use the school's resources (Score:4, Informative)
Unless you're an employee of the school, or use their equipment, you should own anything you do. Graduate students may be employees if they have an assistantship, but undergraduates usually are not.
I had some minor difficulties with Stanford over a similar issue in the mid-1980s. I was a Stanford student, wasn't using any Stanford equipment, and wasn't a Stanford employee. There was some huffing and puffing from the Stanford side, but they knew they had an unwinnable case. It worked out fine for me in the end. Stanford later changed their policy [stanford.edu] in that area, and I was told years later by a faculty member that I was partly responsible for that. The new policy is in some ways worse and in some ways better; Stanford wants a cut, but they'll help market the technology, and if they don't, the inventor gets it back. This is often a win for students. Stanford has very close connections with the Silicon Valley venture community and a track record in licensing technology. Stanford owns a piece of Sun, Cisco, Yahoo, and Google under this deal.
It's much worse if you're arguing over IP rights with some school that doesn't routinely do IP deals. The school administration is likely to be both overbearing and clueless.
Re: (Score:2)
Just recode it (Score:3, Insightful)
If it's a student project then you probably put, what, 2 days of effort into it? You're a geek with youth on your side, and you've probably written 100x as much code for your own amusement than you've written for a stupid assignment/competition.
Just recode it. You'll do it better the second time, anyway, and copyright doesn't cover ideas, just implementations.
The rights may not be the issue ... (Score:2)
The institutions that I have attended and worked for clearly stated that the copyrights belong to the student. End of story.
Yet the university may have the right to prevent publication on other grounds. Even though the aforementioned universities said that the students own the rights to their own work, they also claimed that worked created using their computing facilities could only be used for the advancement of the university's mission. Those policies aren't there to force students to forefit their rig
Re:Oh dear god! (Score:5, Funny)
I crap
Some things are just better if kept to yourself.
Parent
gb2/b/ (Score:2)
When on Slashdot, troll like Slashdot trolls troll.
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Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
I'm currently a PhD student at a UK university and my uni has already said they will take any commercially expliotable IP from me as and when I make it - you didn't think intellectual property was created to help producers did you? This is despite the fact that they are being paid to have me there!
still, for me, if the uni doesn't take my IP then the government will, but that's less common
I made it a condition on accepting my Ph.D offer (a UK university also) that any software/algorithms I developed were mine, and mine alone to exploit/patent/copyright, and that I would release everything under either the GPL or a BSD license. They agreed, after all, a Ph.D. student is worth a lot in grant money.
I don't know why more students don't do this, after all, if they disagree and lose you, they lose your grant money too.
Now I've got three years worth of code to clean up and release, which is going t
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
I developed software that scans DNA looking for componants of genes. Its one of the most accurate methods currently available which is nice, but since my thesis was just submitted this year, and we've only got out two papers, its not exactly well known yet.
Re-working the software into a releasable product is not easy.
Different schools have different placement (Score:3, Insightful)
What a waste. Go to a university, get a BS in Computer Science and make your own games.
And get whom to make the models, textures, maps, and audio? And then get whom to pitch the playable prototype to publishers?
You are going to a game school and making a game for that school. What do you expect?
At a game school, I would expect a game-oriented job fair, game development internships, and other ways of making contacts in the video game industry. The school where I earned a BS in computer science [rose-hulman.edu] didn't have that.
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And get whom to make the models, textures, maps, and audio? And then get whom to pitch the playable prototype to publishers?
You and friends?
People who have submitted their works as free artwork or whose copyrights have expired? Pay someone for them? Here's a fun idea, if I like a band's music, couldn't I help them get some recognition by paying them for songs to put in my game/project?
Of course your work will never be as good as a specialist. Then again, what the hell was expected? Did people like Valve look at the Portal concept and say "eww those models look like shit, next"?
"Game schools" are a joke. I wouldn't mind a class f
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Most companies have an engine that will likely never change in large ways.