Acts of the United Kingdom Parliament can apply to Scotland and Northern Ireland too. Neither Scotland nor Northern Ireland have their own copyright laws; it's all the Copyright and Designs Act 1988.

So, no.

The supervisor's right - they should return them sooner.

Honestly, nothing drove me more nuts than people being inconsiderate with communal glassware. My lab was excellently equipped, with a more than sufficient supply of glassware for the people working there - if they were kept in circulation, that is. Instead they sat in fridges, freezers, in the back of fumehoods, often unlabelled and far past the point of their contents being important or, in some cases, even known.

It's bad lab practice. Keep stocks of intermediates etc. in cleaned out reagent bottles. Keep small samples in glass vials or other "disposable" glassware. Don't store your NMR tubes or marker pens in glassware (I'm not making these examples up).

Although, thinking back on it, maybe that stuff was only really bugging me because it was the last six months of my PhD and *everything* was bugging me...

The patent expired a while ago - 2002 in Europe, anyway - see https://register.epo.org/espacenet/application?number=EP82108835&tab=main

I'm not saying that the CP's claim is valid, only pointing out the difference between a claim that postal codes per se were being "infringed" as opposed to the database.

It's the database of copyrights which a copyright claim has been brought with respect to, not the postal codes themselves. Databases are protected by copyright (disclaimer: in the jurisdictions I know about, which don't include Canada), but individual postal codes would not be.

It isn't the postal codes per se which have been claimed to have been infringed, though, is it? It's the database of postal codes.

I don't know about US or Canadian copyright law, but under UK copyright law there are sui generis database rights which would apply in this case despite a postal code in itself not being eligible for copyright protection.

Thanks for that, that looks very similar to the source material which I was recounting second hand and somewhat misattributing.

A career choice that isn't very popular in these parts :)

But I get to work with individual inventors, helping them secure funding to develop ideas and inventions that otherwise wouldn't see the light of day, as well as SMEs and various university start-ups.

You should certainly be aiming to publish research in peer-reviewed journals during your PhD. Maybe not in your first year, but as you progress. And writing those papers yourself (rather than submitting your results to your supervisor to do so - which might take a while!) is a great learning experience and one of those transferable skills you should aim to pick up along the way.

I wouldn't worry so much about being on the other end of that process, though. In my experience (which I'm not claiming to be universally true), PhD students might be asked by their supervisor to look over an article as a second set of eyes rather than the primary source of an opinion. Post-docs might certainly have more responsibility in that regard, and I'm sure it varies from field to field and from group to group.

Thanks, that's an interesting read. The RSC report I was thinking of is here:

http://www.theukrc.org/files/useruploads/files/the_chemistry_phdwomensretention_tcm18-139215.pdf

But I was made aware of it during a wider presentation on the topic, which touched on more of the stuff I mentioned above.

The working practices thing is interesting to me. I was fortunate in not having a supervisor who ascribed to those beliefs personally (he always thought applying extreme pressure was an excellent way to get falsified results back...), but those expectations still creep in from elsewhere: other group members, other groups in the department, other academics at conferences.

The lack of productivity despite lengthy lab hours is something which totally matches with my experiences too. When you see people in on a Saturday morning just checking BBC news, email and Facebook... It's frustratingly ludicrous.

I didn't play that game until the last six months of my PhD necessitated it (I had a start date for a job lined up), but the amount of people who do is staggering. A friend of a labmate worked in one of the more competitive groups at my department, and worked 16 hour days for 4 months trying to get some research ready for publication. She gave up outside hobbies and even lost her long term boyfriend due to simply never seeing him. When she was making final preparations for her publication, another group independently published basically the same research in a high-profile journal. I wonder if she felt it was worth it.

I worked 9-6ish, 5 days a week, for the most part. At the end of my time I had several publications, a good reference, a good job lined up and the same letters after my name as the 12+ hour a day people. Who's made the better choices there?