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Canadian University Students Taught To Protect IP
Posted by
Zonk
on Sun Apr 08, 2007 06:39 PM
from the they-have-a-few-rights-too dept.
from the they-have-a-few-rights-too dept.
innocent_white_lamb writes "Graduate students at Carleton University (Ottawa) are taking steps to protect their intellectual property, at the same time are insuring that they are being properly recognized for their work. This is in response to the increased commercialization of research done at universities, and high-profile cases of copyright infringement by professors at the University of Toronto and Indiana University. 'The initiative will include workshops and a handbook outlining what would constitute an infraction of students' intellectual property rights, Howlett said. Examples include a student not receiving authorship on written work, or having a professor take credit for their work. "This isn't an indictment of profs at all," said Howlett. "It's just to ensure that students' rights are protected in the case that it does happen."'"
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This is ridiculous (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:This is ridiculous (Score:5, Informative)
Carleton University has had close industrial ties for years. Michael Cowpland, of Mitel and Corel fame, earned his masters and doctorate from Carleton. This close relationship with industry is a good thing, as many of these companies have in turn provided financial support to Carleton for a variety of initiatives. According to relatives of mine who study there, companies like Nortel and March Networks have funded various engineering laboratories. The university likely would not have had such labs were it not for the financial support from industry.
From what I hear from my relatives, Carleton does need to be more careful about their commercial collaborations. But it's not in the area of engineering or design. It's when it comes to their food services. An exclusivity contract with Coca Cola apparently results in there being only Coke available on that campus. Similarly, the company they contract out their food services to, Aramark, provides terrible service and terrible food, but is willing to charge students an arm and a leg.
So Carleton probably has the right idea collaborating with industry when it comes to their research. But their collaboration with companies for various services on-campus should probably be reconsidered.
Parent
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Georgia Tech has the same deal. We had the only Pizza Hut in the world that served Coke products (Pizza Hut was owned by Pepsi). It may still be the only one. Doesn't make it any cheaper, though. It's up to $1.40 for a bottle now. The difference all goes to the school.
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I am so tired of this canard. I worked at Mitel in Kanata in the 1980's, and people were saying the same BS back then. Markham, a suburb of Toronto, had more high tech employees then, and has more high tech employees now. Sure BNR had big labs there, but they also had a bunch of labs scattered across Toronto. IBM has huge plants, although some of them were turned over to Celestica. Just drive up the 404, and yo
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We used to be an exclusively Pepsi school, but I do think this has changed now.
Re:This is ridiculous (Score:4, Informative)
Parent
Re:This is ridiculous (Score:5, Interesting)
Carleton is very, very different from most universities. Last time I saw statistics, around 3/4 of the students were part-time students
Carleton is generally geared more towards continuing and part-time education, rather than simply being a "standard" undergraduate university. You'll have people taking their 2nd & 3rd degrees, upgrading their qualifications, or just taking interest courses.
Many of it's services are (were?) geared towards these students. And I suspect that the nature of the students - people with real-world experience, and thus more awareness of these issues - may have something to do with this.
Parent
Re:This is ridiculous (Score:5, Interesting)
Parent
Re:This is ridiculous (Score:4, Interesting)
Although I do agree that any obstruction of the free flow of information is detrimental to science and academia, I don't think that's the point of this initiative.
If your research is quoted/copied by another scientist (especially, one who is more reputable than you are) without proper citation, it can completely destroy your credibility, and severely hurt when applying for grants or being considered for tenure.
I really don't see anything wrong with this. Like TFA said, there have been several high-profile copyright infringement cases lately, and you'd be a fool not to protect yourself.
This famously happened with some of the original AIDS research in the 80s (that first identified HIV as a retrovirus), where the group of CDC epidemiologists who spearheaded the research received little to no credit for their work once conclusive evidence was found.
Parent
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Not just ancient Sumeria, but also ancient Babylon. In fact, universities are one of the institutions founded by the Lizards who control our world. I have all the rock-solid irrefutable proof right here [amazon.com] ! In fact, that is why we really went to Iraq. To free t
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My first response was: "And....why? Commercialization has done so much to foster communication and intellectual synergy in the U.S., hasn't it?" And the products, whose research we've paid for, are so affordable when the patent is licensed to a monopoly.
Oh, right. I forgot. It would be communism to promote affordable public higher education so universities _have_ to become business enterprises.
Geez, sometimes I feel so sorry for kids today. I think a state college credit was about $12 in my
Re:This is ridiculous (Score:5, Interesting)
Parent
Re:This is ridiculous (Score:5, Insightful)
1. Since you're a student, if you're not being paid to do research and don't use university equipment, you keep whatever you discover.
2. If you are being paid, you're treated like an employee. Employees must sign all patents to the University. The University then decides if it wants to market the patent. If the patent is successfully licensed to someone and a profit is made, the profit is split between the inventor and the university (either 50-50 or 25-75 depending on the circumstances). Otherwise, the patent is returned to you.
I actually like this idea. I want to do research. If I discover something along the way, I don't have to deal with any bureaucracy and still get a nice bonus if my invention is successful.
Parent
Obligatory.. (Score:5, Funny)
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However, the students should also be taught to respect IP. Respecting IP means to not steal another person's IP.
Oh, I don't know about that. Maybe before we teach them to "not steal another person's IP", we should teach them the fundamental reason stealing is wrong: when you steal something, you deprive the rightful owner of that thing.
You can teach this with a simple thought experiment, simply by asking, "If someone stole your car, would you be upset because he got a car without paying for it, or because you didn't have it anymore? If he could make a copy of your car, leaving the original intact and untouched, woul
Excellent! (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Excellent! (Score:4, Interesting)
Parent
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You're really a sharp fellow, you know.
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not IP (Score:5, Insightful)
These are not "intellectual property" rights, they are "moral rights" [wikipedia.org] of authors.
The distinction is important because one can be opposed to copyright as an artifical right created by the state but still be in favor of natural moral rights.
I don't think it's just to use force to prevent you from making a copy of one of my poems; but represent yourself as its author and I'll kick your ass.
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The distinction is important because one can be opposed to copyright as an artifical right created by the state but still be in favor of natural moral rights.
I think you'll find that they are both artificial rights created by the state.
But I agree, the distinction is important: copyrights of any kind exist solely to benefit the public, which has equal interests in 1) having works created and published, and 2) being absolutely f
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The distinction is important because one can be opposed to copyright as an artifical right created by the state but still be in favor of natural moral rights.
I agree with the goal but not this justification. I don't think there's any "natural", "moral" right to have your name associated with anything.
Associating your name with someone else's work, or vice versa, is still wrong - not because the real author owns the work in any sense, but because misrepresenting the authorship is fraud. If I take your comment and repost it as my own work, then I'm lying to everyone who reads it.
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Very different. Lying about or concealing the authorship of a work is an incidence of fraud; making a copy of a work is not.
Stealing something deprives you of it's use; someone who copies our works does not do this, any more than someone who lights a torch off
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Ah, there's some confusion here.
"Moral rights" is in this case a legal term, a translation of the French term "droit moral," refering to legal rights of creators regarding personal and reputational value of a work. [harvard.edu]
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Setting aside that moral rights also cover the integrity of works (i.e. whether and how much people can alter the works of another) and whether artists can remove the attribution of a work to them (i.e. if they don't like what you've done to their work, they can take their name off of it, as if they were never involved in any capacity), it is bad to require people to correctly attribute works.
Provided that the re-attributor is not engaging in actual fraud, why does it matter to the law what they
A good or bad thing? (Score:4, Insightful)
I'm not against students recieving credit, but as with patents, I'm against people ardently claiming credit for the most insignificant things.
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Useful information (Score:4, Informative)
Bad examples. (Score:5, Interesting)
Employment contracts often stipulate that the employee has relinquished intellectual property rights in the field of business of the employer.
This same idea often applied to graduate students that are paid to help out a professor.
If an employer paid you to write a chapter for a book or to invent a widget, you may not have any intellectual property rights over that work.
If you helped a professor in a lab - and if he's paying you under terms of an employment agreement, that agreement could very well stipulate that you have relinquished all IP rights. Read that agreement before you start to work. If you have a problem with it, negotiate the contractual terms.
This is how a company can "award" employee a $200 "bonus" for an invention that's worth millions of dollars.
Here is an example of why this is important (Score:3, Interesting)
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That seems odd. Normally, when a paper is reviewed all references to the authors are removed to prevent any prejudices/favouritism from creeping in (At least for UK journals).
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There's an agreement within Biology that the first listed author is the "primary" author of the work; that is, the person who championed the project, did the bulk of the research, and basically was in charge. The last name was for the person who provided the mentor role; that is the guidance to avoid pitfalls, the initial peer review, and typically the laboratory. In papers with more than two names, the intermediate names are list
Extreme danger (Score:4, Insightful)
If any sort of this nonsensical "Intellectual Property" will become the standard way of producing research results (as opposed to old-fashioned attribution, to which the students have full rights and the University a moral obligation to protect) then this will mean the death of acedemic science. Period.
If every piece of every half-baked paper will cost $50 to read it, a typical researcher will end up with no viable access to any sort of external research.
But of course the further escalation of "Intellectual Property"-related stupidities is only bound to increase in pace, given how hell bent the "opinion makers" are on introducing greed "motivators" where they were never needed or wanted in order to divide and parcel out the body of human knowledge amongst the "worthy" mega-corporations and billionaires who will become the de-facto gate-keepers to that knowledge and subsequently, for all practical purposes, Lords and Masters of the rest of the humanity.
I foresee troubled waters ahead.
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The obvious citation here: Richard Stallman's "The [gnu.org]
Colore me confused (Score:4, Interesting)
-Patents bad
-Steal the music
Ladies and Gentlemen, I'll be brief (Score:3, Funny)
If the whole IP system is guilty, then isn't this an indictment of our educational institutions in general? I put it to you - isn't this an indictment of our entire American society? Well, you can do whatever you want to us, but we're not going to sit here and listen to you badmouth the United States of America. Gentlemen!
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Ethics (Score:2)
At least someone is teaching ethics. Nice to see the pedulum might be swinging back away from the selfish "I want it so I have a right to copy it" crowd.
Re:Ethics (Score:5, Insightful)
Most graduate students would be more than happy to have thousands of people read their thesis. The problem arises when they don't get credited, or someone else claims ownership.
This is very different from students wanting $20 from you to read their paper.
Parent
What about public funded schools and scholarships. (Score:2, Insightful)
Surely if my tax dollars pay part of the tuition for the student copy writing everything he does as part of his education, then we deserve a portion of anything made from it.
I don't think it will come to this, it doesn't with the patent the schools own because public money funded the research. I just don't think it is right, it should be public domain if public money was spent to develop it.
U of T and IU don't seem to be plagiarism (Score:2)
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Re:turnitin.com (Score:5, Informative)
Parent
turnitin clamming rights to student publications (Score:3, Interesting)
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Information wants to be free...but information workers want to get paid.