This morning, I read an article in the New York Times about graduate students who were forced to hand over royalties to their schools for inventions and ideas they were marketing.
I am aware that many contracts with corporate employers make you sign over any ideas or inventions you come up with using company time or resources. I’ve even heard of instances where things you come up with on your own time and own resources are still property of your employer. From what I’ve heard, life as a researcher in industry basically requires you to clam up completely about your work. Anything you work on is considered a trade secret of sorts and if it’s useful, the employer patents it. Little or nothing at all gets published for the outside world to see — most likely you won’t be making a name for yourself in industry. I can understand this mentality to a point: it’s important for a company to protect its ideas. Otherwise, a company might lose out big time if a rival gets hold of something and brings it to market first or changes it in an interesting or unplanned way to make a product better. However, I do think that a company claiming hold on an employee’s idea that was developed on his or her own time and resources is a bit overboard.
If industry guards its research, then academia provides its polar opposite. The concept of academia is to share and build ideas as a collective. In academia, you try to publish everything, to get ideas into the open and to leave your mark. It seems, however, that many academic administrations are clamping down on this free-thinking, open source mentality. In the New York Times article, several examples are cited of schools that are demanding royalties and claiming IP rights to their students’ ideas.
I can understand that without the school, the ideas you come up with as a student may not have been possible. To that end, if you come up with some killer app as a student, using school resources, the school could be entitled to some form of compensation if you try to market your idea. But, unlike the corporate world, it isn’t like the school stands to lose in some way if you try to sell whatever it is that you came up with. I suppose if your idea becomes successful and you leave school prematurely as a consequence, the school may lose out on publications you may produce as a student or tuition you may have paid. However, it’s not like you are leaving the school to become its direct competitor.
The article gives two contrasting examples of students who attempted to market their ideas. In the first example, an MIT student, while interning at NASA during a semester break, came up with some kind of posture detection system. He later tried to market the idea to help elderly people keep good posture and prevent falling. MIT demanded a $75,000 up front payment and royalties if the student wanted to use the idea. There must be more to the story than what is in the article, since if the idea was developed on break while at NASA, then I would imagine NASA would own the rights and any royalties would go there. Also, I suppose if any faculty members were involved then the MIT demands would make more sense. Otherwise, the school provided opportunity and resources, but I would argue the bulk of the effort in development came from the student, not the school.
A more reasonable example in the article references a group of students at RPI that developed a design for water bottles that could snap together to provide housing in undeveloped countries. RPI claimed 25% of any profit and $250 per year if the students decided to sell the idea. This seems to be more on par with the role of the school in the development of such an idea, again as long as it was the students that developed the idea and design.
All of this seems to boil down to the problem that if you want to break ties with your affiliated school or employer and go it alone, you’re going to get screwed. How do you start your own business if you were ever a student or employee? As soon as you try to sell your ideas, your past will come back and demand compensation. An IP lawyer in the article states: “The mission of a student is to research, get their degree, and move on with their life, and if you start fooling around with this stuff too much, it’s a total distraction.” This really gets me — obviously the lawyer has no idea what it means to be a graduate student. The mission isn’t to get your degree and move on with your life: the mission is to gain an understanding in some research area and develop your own ideas. You develop these ideas so that when you do get your degree, you have something to say for yourself. You use your research ideas as a selling point to employers, in academia or industry. But, it seems that no longer can you use your research in school as a starting point for going it alone without expecting to be penalized.
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