Do you really own the rights to your great new invention? How about the copyright
of your latest novel? What about the first novel you wrote while you were in
college? If you don't pay close attention to patent and copyright policies of
your schools and your workplace, you could be in for a very ugly surprise.
This week, while attending the monthly Geek Dinner here in Los Angeles,
I met a young gentleman who developed a system for random number
generation. In fact,
this system was so important you may have read about him on Slashdot and other
online news sources. During our conversation, an interesting fact came out.
Despite the fact that he had developed this system himself, he
did not own the rights
to patent. He could not license the information and, in some ways, was even
prevented from talking about the patent except in the vaguest terms.
While he is able to
exploit his discoveries in other ways, the fact is, his university owns all
the rights because he was a student there at the time he developed
his system.
The concept that a university could own the rights to your creative
endeavors gave me food for thought. I have dealt with the copyright
issues involved when
I was writing while still in a corporate job, but I hadn't thought about it
lately. Since I work for myself, there is very little occasion
when I fall under the
typical work-for-hire stipulations that you find in many contracts. So, I sat
down with the usual online resources and began investigating the policies at
several well-known universities.
Who?
One of the first items I noticed is, many university policies on
patent and copyright at one time only applied to the administration,
faculty and staff of the university.
Students, it seems, were exempted unless they were also employees of the school.
Several policies though have since been amended to add both graduate students
and post-doctoral fellows in the policy, as well, probably because their fellowships
qualify them as being on the payroll of the university. In my basic research,
though, I didn't turn up any policy that applied to undergraduate students.
So there are no worries about the university owning those bad poems
you wrote freshman
year.
What this policy review shows, though, is that you need to be very
aware of the policies that apply to you and your work, whether
in an academic forum or in
a corporate workplace. While these policies are similar in many ways, individual
businesses can often have stricter policies. In some cases, companies can try
to declare all work produced while you are employed, both inside and outside
the workplace, as work-for-hire and therefore property of the company.
What to look for?
If you have substantial creative work that is produced outside your
day-to-day job, you should contact your company's legal department
and get a clear understanding
of the policies that might effect you. If you are being offered a job with
a company, you will want to investigate these policies before agreeing
to take
the position. Otherwise, you might find yourself handing over your creative
rights to your new company. In fact, if you have already created
a substantial invention
that might be patentable, or written a copyrightable work, you may need to
explicitly exclude this from any hiring agreement in order to protect
yourself. If you fail
to do so, you might be in for a long road of litigation in the future.
Such thoughts about patents and copyrights rarely entered the minds
of most workers in the past, unless they were high-level chemists
or engineers who might create
entirely new concepts or materials. Today, though, it is a rare worker who
doesn't have outside interests and outside projects that might,
one day, turn into a
product or service worth millions of dollars. Whenever large amounts of money
are involved, strict policies about who receives that money are sure to be
found. Don't be blindsided by the policies of your school or business
when it comes
to patents and copyright. Your future career success depends on the continued
ownership of your creative works and the income they may generate. You want
your work to enrich your life and expand your career, not the bottom
line of your
employer.
Comments, Questions, Reviews?
Career
Opportunities
