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Universities Patenting More Student Ideas
Posted by
kdawson
on Sun Jan 04, 2009 04:23 AM
from the thanks-for-the-research dept.
from the thanks-for-the-research dept.
theodp writes "Working as a NASA intern, grad student Erez Lieberman had a eureka moment, resulting in an algorithm that detects whether a person is standing correctly or is off balance. Unfortunately, MIT liked it so much they decided to patent it. Seeking permission to use his own idea for his iShoe startup, which develops products like insoles to address the problems of seniors, Lieberman was told no problem — as long as he promised a hefty royalty and forked over a $75,000 upfront payment. Whether or not students are aware of it, the NYTimes reports that most universities own inventions created by students that were developed using a 'significant' amount of schools resources. Colleges and universities once obtained fewer than 250 patents a year, but that was before the Bayh-Dole Act gave them ownership of inventions developed through federally financed research. Now they acquire about 3,000 a year, and in 2006 licensing fees and equity in spinoff companies totaled at least $45B — research powerhouses like Stanford and NYU pocketed $61M and $157M, respectively."
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BinaryGrind writes "I just got started taking Computer Science classes at my local university and after reading Universities Patenting More Student Ideas I felt I needed to ask: How do I tell if any of my projects while attending classes will be co-opted by my professors or the university itself and taken away from me? Is there anything I can do to prevent it from happening? What do I need to do to protect myself? Are there schools out there that won't take my work away from me if I discover TheNextBigThing(TM)? If it does happen is there anything I can do to fight back? The school I'm attending is Southern Utah University. Since it's not a big university, I don't believe it has a big research and development department or anything of that ilk. I'm mostly wanting to cover my bases and not have my work stolen from me."
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Exploitation (Score:4, Insightful)
The stupid exploit the smart.
Re:Exploitation (Score:5, Insightful)
The stupid exploit the smart.
Please. Most university faculty are a looong way from stupid. That said, while I understand the argument that university resources are being used in the creation of these "inventions" (ideas), surely the fact that THE STUDENTS ARE ALREADY PAYING FOR USE OF THESE RESOURCES should mean that they owe the university nothing, and anything outside of normal coursework is theirs to call their own.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
The stupid exploit the smart.
Please. Most university faculty are a looong way from stupid. That said, while I understand the argument that university resources are being used in the creation of these "inventions" (ideas), surely the fact that THE STUDENTS ARE ALREADY PAYING FOR USE OF THESE RESOURCES should mean that they owe the university nothing, and anything outside of normal coursework is theirs to call their own.
Incorrect. They are paying tuition and fees, plus living expenses. None of that is covered in the research facilities and Federal Research dollars that build those facilities, pay for PhDs and have a built-in R&D factory.
Re:Exploitation (Score:5, Insightful)
So writing an algorithm on a computer is suddenly expensive and causing large costs to the university, that would justify patenting a potentially revolutionary algorithm, and not giving it back to the student? Let the Croatian universities dare patent or even copyright something I worked on, unless it was specifically for the university, or as part of university work.
In any case, this story teaches us something. Show only stupid ideas to the university, keep the others to yourself.
Parent
Re:""Show only stupid ideas" (Score:4, Insightful)
Except they have a weird squeeze play going on.
1. It's hard for the mind to reach its absolute top limits if part of it is busy playing an IP metagame. There's some unknown amount of damage to the student here.
2. The point of a classical Masters or Doctorate degree is to push the boundaries to achieve new results. So if you're saving your big ace in the hole it's the Elephant In The Room problem.
(Degree committee) "This paper is kinda neat, but there's clearly something not stated... deny the degree. The student is hosed, so he has no choice but to tell us."
Except weird super-high end Physical/Biosciences tests, and maybe a portion of CompSci, "education" consists of books plus 42 lectures plus a "sorta-reliable" proof to employers that you learned a little. We all know the soft degrees subsidize the scary equipment. We know Paper Publishing is a racket.
But the IP ideas can be worth millions. With that last fragment in the equation, it just barely might NOT be worth going to a "top" university, and instead fish out a semi-obscure one that just happens to have beautifully liberal IP policies. When it comes to the usual boring interview question for resumes "Gee, why didn't you go to Harvard?" The answer is "Because I like owning MY business thank you."
Parent
Re:Exploitation (Score:4, Insightful)
This is akin to saying you pay for time on expensive research equipment and that facility OWNS what you've come up with. Typical bullshit said by someone who has no idea what they are talking about.
You pay fees to rent both the teaching time and lab time. If I write a program on a rented laptop the program is OWNED BY ME not by the rental company.
The same as if I borrow your lawn mower, you don't own my lawn.
Parent
Re:Exploitation (Score:4, Insightful)
Parent
Property, Universities, Government (Score:5, Insightful)
"Property" addles the brain. Also, universities don't see their mission as helping the economy, so acts on their part which harm the formation of wealth are fine, as long as their research is protected.
Government, however, should know better. But there, lawyers (such as most politicians) make the decisions, and law is centred around property (well, '9/10'ths of it is). Lawyers are often constitutionally incapable of comprehending how certain forms of "intellectual property" are counterproductive. Besides, politicians frequently confuse economics and finance, and are under constant pressure to reduce costs, rather than maximise productivity.
Additionally, in terms of American politics, universities are expected to do what they can with their own "assets" according to industry norms; to do otherwise would seem "socialist". Ironically, this attitude results in a branch of the state owning wealth-creating ideas and effectively taxing them twice (once to use the idea, once with the profits made from the idea).
This attitude on the part of Government isn't exclusive to the US. In my home city of Cambridge, UK, the university fought Government pressure to claim patent rights over student and staff discoveries. Here, ownership of one's ideas has had a long history. In the end some compromise (generous licence terms) was found, but the Government truly do not understand the harm that it is causing - ultimately to its own tax revenue.
Parent
The reason businesses like IP (Score:5, Interesting)
...is because it shows up on their balance sheets. Investors like it because instead of R&D being a cost to a company, it now becomes a profit center because R&D creates "IP", much like a shovel and pick create/discover "minerals" that can be sold or exploited.
Never mind that IP is nothing like actual property; they'll keep passing more laws to make an idea seem more like a thing for investment purposes.
Plus, then IP shows up in GDP, can be bought and sold, and "creates wealth". Never mind that it's the equivalent of eating your seed corn to lock away knowlege, the human condition always values being satisfied now versus building for the future.
Parent
Re:Exploitation (Score:5, Informative)
The situation is somewhat different in the UK, but the costs my university reports to funding bodies and the like is typically 5 to 10 times that of the actual tuition/salary level - pretty much regardless of the levels of facilities used. Thus the position of the university is that the student's education is in all cases heavily subsidized by university money, and that justifies their position on IPR (which, to be fair, is also much more lax than the one reported in the article at my university at least).
Parent
Re:Exploitation (Score:5, Informative)
I don't have a problem with this policy. Here's why:
With all this, generally it is only if the student's idea is based on an existing body of research (say a refinement of an area of his PI's work) or if he received significant faculty/university support in development of the idea/product. The "slice" that the university takes is quite reasonable at the universities I've worked with/at. It's far less than a VC would take (typically 80-95% or more).
And finally, the summary (no surprise here) is grossly inflammatory. It makes it sound like this guy was drinking Mountain Dew and chilling at the house when all of a sudden bam! He comes up with this amazing algorithm all by his lonesome. Please, this work was shared by many researchers from several institutions with a fair amount of start up capital to get going (50,000 from a competition and developed at the NASA research center). Patent owners include 4 other individuals as well as NASA, Harvard, and UC San Diego in addition to MIT. It was developed specifically to treat loss of balance in astronauts and later Lieberman decided to investigate its viability in the private sector.
"Eureka moments" don't exist, at least not the way popular media/literature portrays it. Any decent eureka! is preceded by years and years of training and diligence or followed by the same. Having an idea is not the same as making an idea happen.
Far from a patent apologist, but this one's a stretch.
Parent
Belief in Eureka! is foundation for patent system (Score:5, Insightful)
You've nailed it. This is the problem with IP. One the one hand, creativity and innovation are always the result of collaboration between large numbers of people (much of it informal, unconscious, or indirect). On the other, IP allocates exclusive rights to an individual or organization. Invariably, many or most of the contributors are excluded while the IP owner free-rides on their work. Furthermore, because ownership ends up being held by many hands, future work is often forstalled. It runs into the tragedy of the anticommons [wikipedia.org]: all owners must give their permission, and each owner is inclined to overvalue their contribution - not surprising, given that the system has already overvalued it by giving ownership to more than they produced.
Why? As lawyer James Boyle so eloquently details in his book Shamans, Software & Spleens, the legal system continues to make counterproductive rulings precisely because of the romantic myth of the lone inventor or author who has that Eureka! moment and creates something new out of thin air. The illusion you dismiss is a core foundation of the system as it stands (for copyright too, if you look back at the development of the concept of authorship, which is quite recent historically).
Let me make it clear what I have said and what I have not said (not necessarily for you, but people will make assumptions): I am not making a claim about the ideal outcome in this case. Neither am I proposing to abolish patents or IP - something I could not do without weighing their costs against their benefits. My beef is with your arguments.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
The process is that someone with great power and possibly little foresight, creates a policy that can be in effect for twenty-five years, or more. During the policy's lifespan, many changes to culture and student life, the economy -- impact changes -- will cause each poli
Re:Exploitation (Score:5, Insightful)
Parent
Great (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Great (Score:5, Insightful)
Well they should've read the IP document they signed when they took the funding, then.
Not sure how it works in most fields, but in the one I'm in, it's your boss that gets the funding, not you. So their boss should have told them that. Of course, even if they had, this situation would STILL be ridiculous. It's not like students have much bargaining power, especially when it comes to who gets the rights. Not accepting the bargain would mean the student in question would be working AT a shoe store, not running a software company for them.
Parent
Re:Great (Score:5, Insightful)
Given the number of stories like this that hit the press, it should be well-known by now that your employer or university owns your work unless you have an explicit exemption. I live in a jurisdiction where software patents are invalid, and added a section to the grant application that work from the projects I've worked on would be released under a BSD license, so I can take them and do whatever I want with them (so can anyone else) after the project has finished. Most academics are more interested in reputation than money, so it's generally easy to get them to agree to permissive licensing, as long as you do it in advance.
Parent
Re:Great (Score:5, Insightful)
It doesn't disturb me me that university owns the patent instead of the student, but what does disturb me is that the university owns the patent for research paid by public tax dollars.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
I can see why a university thinks it should get ownership. You paid for the education and you're getting an education. Creating something new isn't necessarily part of that process and you may not have been able to do it without their resources.
Encouraging innovation (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Makes a lot of sense to do it the correct way, nope on the other hand this turns around and makes sure that those brilliant idea never see the light of day in some cases and in other cases where the funds should go to the student/entrepreneur so they can get their own startup going, it never happens.
Re:Encouraging innovation (Score:5, Informative)
Easy solution - go to EU. The patent as described is a pure software patent and would be invalid outside US (and Japan). Way to squash innovation, US. :P
Parent
Re:Encouraging innovation (Score:4, Interesting)
Easy solution - go to EU. The patent as described is a pure software patent and would be invalid outside US (and Japan). Way to squash innovation, US. :P
You forgot sell to EU. The US and every country getting on board with "our" (not mine) IP laws makes it a crime to sell that program in the US, because the patent is still valid here.
This is what the Gates Foundation is about - they are not there to cure disease. It's easy to see that not every country is going to let them in to vaccinate, because you have to basically adopt US IP law (esp. regarding patents - this is about big pharma) to get the vaccinations.
Canada is rapidly coming on board as well, although I've certainly never heard from a Canadian who thinks that our IP law is sensible. And the fight is beginning to heat up over which parts of Central & South America will get in line.
Parent
I have had something similar happen to me. (Score:4, Informative)
The university where I graduated from forced all students to sign an agreement that any work that you do while a student of the university, they hold all the copyrights.
I have come up with ideas and made many music recordings, all of which I have have zero right to exploit as I do not own the rights. It doesn't matter if the work was done at home or at a university campus.
Re:I have had something similar happen to me. (Score:5, Informative)
Copyright, not patent. Also was it the exclusive copyright?
If I am not mistaken, at my university, they get the right to copy my works done for the universtity (papers, reports, thesis, a.s.o ), but I still retain my copyright as the author.
Patents are a different matter: They only get it, when I choose to apply for the patent through the university. Then they take care of the legal and commercial matters and I get a share of the profit (IRC, 30 percent).
Parent
Re:I have had something similar happen to me. (Score:5, Insightful)
at my university, ... Patents are a different matter: They only get it, when I choose to apply for the patent through the university. Then they take care of the legal and commercial matters and I get a share of the profit (IRC, 30 percent).
So the University gets their name on the patent for your work, they sign a contract granting you 30% of 'profit' derived from the patent, and here's the important part: you have no control over the licensing fee.
So if you want to use their patent, guess what, they can make the licensing fee extortionate enough that you cannot follow through on your business plan.
Kind of like what is happening to Mr. iShoe.
Parent
Animal House 2009 (Score:4, Funny)
"Whaddya mean they patented our Toga Party concept?"
Some balance is needed (Score:4, Interesting)
Australian Universities (Score:5, Interesting)
http://http//www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/story.asp?storyCode=404351§ioncode=26 [http]
Re:Australian Universities (Score:5, Funny)
Holy shit! Australia isn't batshit insane for once. I guess Howard never got around to the universities.
Parent
Bass Ackwards (Score:5, Insightful)
Waterloo (Score:4, Interesting)
Patent it First? (Score:5, Insightful)
If you have a realy good idea that you intend to start a business with then patent it before you submit your work!
You would have to do it anyway
Using Uni resources means they own it (Score:3, Insightful)
If you don't want the Uni to own your ideas, then don't use their resources to develop them. The same goes for business, if you work for a corporation and use their resources to develop an idea, then they own it.
You might not like it, but our society and legal system prefers those who take the most [financial] risk, not those who are the most creative.
Unsteady ground. Literally. (Score:5, Interesting)
We should be careful here. The system may be best left as is. The idea is that:
most universities own inventions created by students that were developed using a 'significant' amount of schools resources.
This is to protect universities against people taking 99% of the university's idea/invention, adding 1%, and then using the university's research to make money while the university keeps begging for donations. Some universities may be fine monetarily, but some need all the money they can get to keep up their standards.
Onto this case. Perhaps MIT & NASA already had the equipment and a similar algorithm that Lieberman simply added an elegant flourish to. If that's the case, he should get some joint arrangement going, but he shouldn't be allowed to pass it off as if he developed the entire thing himself. But what it actually sounds more like, is they both sides significantly contributed, which makes things difficult.
He can try to prove that the university's contribution to the project was "insignificant", but that's going to be a hard sell. If I were him, I'd see what friends I still have in the MIT bureaucracy, see what they can do, and then (while trying to not to ostrichsize them) try to get as much media attention as possible so that MIT can make a good-will announcement that they're giving him the rights.
I'm going to be unpopular here, but... (Score:5, Informative)
Let's keep a few things in mind:
1. This was "a technology he created as an intern at NASA in the summer of 2007 [nytimes.com]." It's not like he was an undergraduate sitting in a classroom -- he was working for NASA when he made the invention.
2. "The iShoe researchers used some of their own work and previous NASA data [usatoday.com]," the latter presumably taken with "an expensive device about the size of a phone booth" in the creation of their invention. So NASA's data (and presumably equipment) were needed to produce the invention.
3. While an intern, Lieberman was also a federally-funded (i.e., taxpayer-supported) graduate student, receiving money from both the National Science Foundation and Department of Defense [mit.edu], through his university, for his research. Like many (perhaps substantially all) graduate researchers in US universities, he was being paid by his university to do research. The fact that the research was being conducted at NASA doesn't change the fact that Lieberman was on the university payroll at the time the invention was made. Welcome to internships.
4. His company has also filed for federal funding [usatoday.com] to develop the idea for market and, "[o]nce funding is obtained, the iShoe could be for sale in 18 months, Lieberman said." So he's still using taxpayer money to develop the invention for market.
5. We don't know what the "hefty royalty" is (unless I missed it, it's not in any of the linked articles), but $75,000 is peanuts. "The iShoe has a way to go to reach the market [...] Lieberman estimates $1 million is needed for a broad clinical trial, and $3 million to $4 million [usatoday.com] to bring the insole to market." As a startup, his monthly burn rate will be much more than $75,000.
Frankly, I'm fine with institutions receiving a financial return on the work of their paid employees -- especially if taxpayers are ultimately footing the bill. In fact, I would argue that Mr. Lieberman is getting a sweetheart deal; I think once he gets into industry himself he'll find that the commercial sector typically requires employees to assign all rights to any future inventions (at least, in the company's field of interest) to their employer starting on Day 1, usually with trivial or no compensation.
It will be interesting to see what intellectual property policy the new iShoe company establishes for its own employees. As CEO [ishoeinsole.com], will Lieberman let his iShoe researchers invent and patent without expecting that those inventions will belong to iShoe?
Three Rules for College Students (Score:5, Insightful)
1. NEVER EVER SHARE AN ORIGINAL IDEA IN CLASS OR IN A PAPER
It will be patented, copyrighted and sold by the university. Additionally, you will never be able to use it again without paying.
2. NEVER EVER USE UNIVERSITY COMPUTERS FOR DEVELOPING A BUSINESS
If you are successful, one day the University will come looking to extort money from you because they have one email where you outlined the idea.
3. USE YOUR OWN COMPUTERS AND BRING YOUR OWN NETWORK.
Don't use the University's high speed. For lots of reasons. Starting with the ease with which universities will give third parties like the RIAA information. Moving on to intellectual property rights. Moving on to using your activities against you in academic disputes. You just can't trust them, and the only way to be sure you own your work is to own the computer and network. In other words, get a 3G card.
Welcome to the real world (Score:5, Informative)
At my university, the administration makes it very clear that any IP rights for student inventions due to a classroom assignment belong to the student. A purely academic "student", by definition, is not an employee of the university.
A graduate research assistant is another matter entirely. A GRA is an employee of the university, paid by the university, and subject to the same IP regulations as the faculty and staff. In that respect my university is, in my opinion, extremely generous compared to private companies, as it allows faculty to have joint ownership of the IP, to develop as they see fit as long as the university receives a reasonable royalty. Considering the millions of dollars worth of capital equipment the university has placed at my disposal, I consider that quite a bargain.
Mr. Leiberman will never get a better deal for an idea he developed on someone else's dime for as long as he lives. If he can't afford the $75K upfront fee, he should talk to the MIT IP lawyers and see if he can negotiate a reduction in return for a slightly higher royalty rate. He might be surprised how willing they are to work with him.
Re:Non-profit? (Score:5, Insightful)
I think a better idea might be to force federally-funded schools to do something similar to that. If the government is giving a researcher/professor/whatever a grant from taxes based on his or her past accomplishments, the university gets a huge chunk of it - unless I'm mistaken (and I very well could be.) For the university to then get whatever comes out of that is fundamentally stupid. From my experience, the university does nothing besides initially invest in the researchers. Well, that's not exactly true, they give me parking tickets occasionally too. I should say I'm a grad student, so I'm somewhat talking out of my ass here, and I might be biased (parking tickets!!!) but from what I can tell, the university gets more than their fair share.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Once upon a time this was the role that educational institutions vaguely resembled.
Unfortunately such entities are "inefficient" and "bureaucratic".
Re:Non-profit? (Score:4, Insightful)
This is so awesome.
In the past ppl got to patent their ideas.
Now it is part of the Corporate Government that can seize
any hopes young ppl now have of making it in this world.
You pay for the education, and if you do something brilliant
with what you paid for in full, they take it from you.
The Parasitic United States of America has been born.
Parent
Re:Awesome (Score:4, Interesting)
You nailed the post I was thinking, so I'll try a followup. Since the RIAA has told us how much IP is worth, that makes the student's contribution about a million dollars right?
What happens if you take a semester off?
Parent
Re:Non-profit? (Score:5, Funny)
I misread the title as: "Universities Pirating More Student Ideas".
After reading the blurb, I believe that I didn't misread the title after all.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Dude, you never go full retard.
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Non-profit? (Score:5, Informative)
I can't speak for the post grads or researchers but at the UK university I studied CS at the policy was a bit different. We were all given log books and encouraged to use them so that if we had a good idea we could claim legal ownership of it. Also, during my third year research project I asked about ownership and was told that my project would remain mine unless I gave permission for the University could take it and run with it later (which incidentally I did and got a publication out of it).
Parent
Re:KEEP YOUR IDEAS TO YOURSELF! (Score:5, Informative)
Parent
Re:Publish immediately and then no one can charge (Score:5, Insightful)
I don't know how it is now, but when I went to NYU for my Ph.D. studies there was nothing like this you had to sign. You retained copyright to anything you did, just like professors and tuition paying students did. It was University policy that they owned any patents they filed for on your behalf, but you would get 50% of the royalties. There was very little pressure to apply for patents on your inventions, those who took the University up on it's offer were dreaming of the royalties. Those who didn't were generally the pulled-up-themselves-up-by-the-bootstraps sort who felt that patenting their ideas was an ignoble act after their run of good luck in getting where they were (it takes more than just smarts).
I highly doubt MIT coerced this former graduate student into patenting his invention. He probably just got greedy and now the university is seeking a little cost recovery. The issues concerning whether it when it is good idea to patent your inventions have been well understood among engineering and science graduate students for about a decade now, so I'm fairly confident that he was well aware of them.
Parent
Re:Publish immediately and then no one can charge (Score:4, Insightful)
It was University policy that they owned any patents they filed for on your behalf, but you would get 50% of the royalties.
Given the cost of registering then protecting your patent in the courts would be prohibitive to all and near impossible for most ordinary salary earners (let alone students on their student grants!), that's actually quite a sound deal they're offering.
Parent