Re: joint work/U.S. govt.

Juli Krute <juliann[_at_]people-are.strange.com> wrote:
>
> What about joint govt-private research projects? For instance, a NASA
> scientist and a private semiconductor lab collaborating on an article
> about new development procedures? If the NASA scientist learned the
> information through her official governmental research, does her
> contribution to the article consitute acting in official capacity?

I suppose I should know the answer to that question, since my sister IS a NASA scientist (an astronaut, actually), but I don't. At least it presents a realistic scenario in which the joint work problem would arise.

To reiterate a caveat: I haven't done any research on this issue at all. I'm just trying to think about what would make sense. And here, we have conflicting policies: on the one hand, we want government works to be freely available to all; on the other hand, we want to encourage the creation of new works by giving a copyright to private parties. Since I'm generally in favor of a strong public domain, I suppose I think that the government involvement should render the article non-copyrightable; but it certainly wouldn't surprise me if a court found a way to reach a different result.

Tyler T. Ochoa
Associate Professor
Whittier Law School
tochoa[_at_]law.whittier.edu Received on Wed Mar 25 1998 - 00:32:49 GMT