Re: Dissertations & Theses

On Sat, 1 Feb 1997, Richard Greenfield wrote:
>
> [snip]
> There was an interesting and related incident last year at the University
> of Washington (as reported in the Wall Street Journal of Oct. 8) where a
> doctoral student in computer science named Brian Pinkerton had his
> dissertation on Internet search engines purchased by America Online for
> $1.4 million dollars plus stock options. Mr. Pinkerton then went to work
> for AOL. I assumed he never became Dr. Pinkerton and that the
> dissertation is NOT on the shelves of the University of Washington
> library system, not on microfiche with UMI. I have never had time to
> check this, but maybe Harold Federow knows the answer.
> [snip]

It is a very good thing Brian did not attend a university in Florida! He might be serving on a chain gang too had his school asserted their IP rights over him for stealing his own ideas!

[Background]
Most recently the case was described in _Time_ Feb 10, '97 p. 64 Also an article on June 19, 1996 by Lisa Holewa Assoc. Press.

It involves Pat. # 5,082,813 (Unfortunately I am a member of the Information Poor and do not have access to WestLaw database for the Federal case #s!!<G>).

It seems Petr Taborsky a Czech? (chemistry student) was sentenced to a maximum-security prison chain gang. Why? because the Univ. South Florida claims THEY own HIS invention!

Taborsky obtained PERMISSION from his *advisor* to experiment with left-overs from a DEAD research project. BOTH the company AND the university abandoned the research as non-viable. All funding dried up. Taborsky worked on his OWN time to discover a process that was later patented. (He patented the work after a federal court order was issued telling him not to.) He wrote all these experiments up in his own notebooks he purchased with his OWN money. He took the notebooks with him when he gave up on trying to work with the school and company who only wanted his invention for free! The University had Taborsky convicted of GRAND THEFT and theft of trade secrets. Civil lawsuits are pending... (BTW, he was moved to a less secure prison about the time the publicity came out. i.e. he is no longer working on a Florida Chain Gang.)

BTW, speaking of that "reverse" plagiarism case that Robert A. Baron mentioned the other day in his posting, Taborsky's Prof. tried (unsuccessfully) to patent Petr's work himself.

The story is MUCH more complex than I have outlined. But the crux seems to be related to who owns IP generated in Universities! And how far will the respective parties go to defend their positions?

[Comments]
Very often graduate students in the sciences believe that they "own" the research they do. They believe what they write in their notebooks is "theirs". Advisors seem to unwittingly encourage this belief by making the student purchase a notebook from the students OWN pockets. The most common thing I see happening is either the student wants to publish on his/her own w/o the professor's knowledge. (Professor wants to do more experiments first to confirm phenomenon observed). Or often the students get into fights over what other student's data goes in the publication and the inevitable "I WANT TO BE THE FIRST AUTHOR IN THE PAPER" scenario.... All this comes about (i think) because of a lack of understanding by students that ALL IP generated on a college campus no matter how much personal TIME and personal EQUIPMENT you use, universities OWN the IP rights! (Or at least they try to claim they do). I won't argue whether this is fair, but it must be acknowledged that universities "encouraged" this belief by both faculty and students when for YEARS faculty were allowed to collect royalties from any works they copyrighted. The colleges unwittingly set a precedent? that the generator of IP on campus did in fact "own" their "own" IP. Even journal publishers seek (c) releases from the authors and not from the universities' office of IP law.

Given the MASSIVE complexity of the IP law system, it seems all college students need to be informed of all possible consequences working toward their degrees or even just working on campus. One can no longer trust their advisor's word on IP law! Forced enrollment in IP courses is needed at all colleges! and grade schools?? (e.g. the children can memorize slogans such as "Don't copy that floppy" and "Don't scan that skin.") :-)

Often it is the International student with limited English communication skills and cultural differences that were never exposed to the U.S. concepts of copyright and plagiarism in their home country, that fall easy victim. I have repeatedly seen a stunned look on the face of an International student when he/she is told that the uncited quote in their paper is called "plagiarism". NO ONE told them this before! BTW, Taborsky came to the U.S. at age 6. It is unclear if he is himself an "International student" per se. I don't know if Mr. Pinkerton was "foreign" or his parents were "rich" but it is interesting that his school did not prosecute him too...

Nevertheless, we in the U.S. have what might be called our own flavor of "Human Rights Violations" and "Political Prisoners". We bring huge numbers of international students to fill our graduate school places that only a few Americans have any interest in (e.g. physics and chemistry etc.). We do not inform/educate them about subtleties of our laws and culture, yet we expect them to accept the consequences of all our ways and laws etc... I won't get into the exploitation through any of the more common scenarios these students fall victim to, it is enough to mention IP issues only on this list. Perhaps these are harsh words, but what else can you call it when one college student goes to jail for his IP, another collects a few million dollars for his IP? Something seems wrong somewhere.

Charles Keller

<keller[_at_]ra.msstate.edu>                      Thoughts for the day:
     Nothing is more difficult in the world than to get a good many
     hundreds of thousands or millions of people to do something they
     have never done before.  Three stages of all great inventions:
     1) people said the thing could not be done; 2) they said anybody
     could do it; and 3) they said it had always been done by everybody.